Ads appear in posts

[vchimpanzee]

It's very misleading. It makes it look like the ad is part of the post and it's hard to see that it isn't. Sometimes there is a link in the actual post that I miss, and I miss the whole point of the post.

 

[lanceventa]

Those ads are what pay the hosting costs to keep the site alive. They shouldn't be appearing inside actual posts but between posts.

If anyone else is seeing them inside posts please let us know.

 

[CTListener]

I see them in posts frequently, even posted an amusing incidence of one as part of a thread a while back. I'll see if I can find it, or the screenshot I took of it at the time.

 

[CTListener]

Found it! This ad for merchandise inserted itself into a post by TheBigA back on Jan. 21. There was no cashmere offer involved in Salem's original announcement!

 

[Negin]

I saw this on another board. There was some change done by the ad provider (not the forum's admin) that caused ads in weird places. They even snuck in on the donator's usergroup (which one can move to when they donate to the board). The board sys-op did made changes in the ad vendor's website and the rogue ads were gone.

 

[lanceventa]

I saw this on another board. There was some change done by the ad provider (not the forum's admin) that caused ads in weird places. They even snuck in on the donator's usergroup (which one can move to when they donate to the board). The board sys-op did made changes in the ad vendor's website and the rogue ads were gone.

Without knowing ad provider and board system, I have no way of knowing whether this is applicable. It seems that board was using Google Adsense's AutoAds.

We're not using that here. Everything is placed in templates, but because they were setup years before I got involved its a matter of checking a lot of code I know nothing about. I have changed some that I hope stop this from happening, but I'm flying blind.

 

[yeoldeschool]

Without knowing ad provider and board system, I have no way of knowing whether this is applicable. It seems that board was using Google Adsense's AutoAds.

We're not using that here. Everything is placed in templates, but because they were setup years before I got involved its a matter of checking a lot of code I know nothing about. I have changed some that I hope stop this from happening, but I'm flying blind.

I looked, and your ad provider at insideradio.com appears to be inserting its advertisement image URLs into various types of meta tags in the HTML at imageradio.com itself, essentially hijacking them. It's specifically targeting the types of meta tags that normally point to URLs for images or logos that are representative of the site itself -- i.e. image that you, the site owner, would normally create and then embed links to within your site's HTML's meta tags.

This type of tag hijack will naturally cause any spiders like Google, and any scrapers built into software like XenForo here at radiodiscussions.com, to ingest and re-display those images elsewhere in association with links to your site. Those spiders/scrapers aren't at fault -- they just believe they're passing along image URLs that point to visual representations or symbols for whatever the page is about.

Look at the three attachments. The first attachment is the HTML of the radiodiscussions.com post reported above. I highlighted the relevant part in green. That's an ad image URL that XenForo scraped out of the HTML of the insideradio.com page being linked to. Then look at the second and third images. Those show examples of how your ad provider at insideradio.com populated various meta tags within the HTML over there, one of which is a direct match for the URL embedded in the radiodiscussions post.

It's the meta og:image instance in yellow that's the one in particular XenForo appears to have scraped up and redisplayed here. Merely targeting that specific meta tag can only lead me to believe this is a malicious attempt by your ad provider to cause its ads to appear "house of mirrors" style in various unpredictable places, in order to gain free "air time." (og:image is essentially the "master" link for whatever image a given web page should be visually represented by. You would never want this to be some garbage, throw-away, ephemeral image like an advertisement.)

 

[lanceventa]

I looked, and your ad provider at insideradio.com appears to be inserting its advertisement image URLs into various types of meta tags in the HTML at imageradio.com itself, essentially hijacking them. It's specifically targeting the types of meta tags that normally point to URLs for images or logos that are representative of the site itself -- i.e. image that you, the site owner, would normally create and then embed links to within your site's HTML's meta tags.

This type of tag hijack will naturally cause any spiders like Google, and any scrapers built into software like XenForo here at radiodiscussions.com, to ingest and re-display those images elsewhere in association with links to your site. Those spiders/scrapers aren't at fault -- they just believe they're passing along image URLs that point to visual representations or symbols for whatever the page is about.

Look at the three attachments. The first attachment is the HTML of the radiodiscussions.com post reported above. I highlighted the relevant part in green. That's an ad image URL that XenForo scraped out of the HTML of the insideradio.com page being linked to. Then look at the second and third images. Those show examples of how your ad provider at insideradio.com populated various meta tags within the HTML over there, one of which is a direct match for the URL embedded in the radiodiscussions post.

It's the meta og:image instance in yellow that's the one in particular XenForo appears to have scraped up and redisplayed here. Merely targeting that specific meta tag can only lead me to believe this is a malicious attempt by your ad provider to cause its ads to appear "house of mirrors" style in various unpredictable places, in order to gain free "air time." (og:image is essentially the "master" link for whatever image a given web page should be visually represented by. You would never want this to be some garbage, throw-away, ephemeral image like an advertisement.)

InsideRadio ISN"T an ad provider. That's a competing news publication where you likely looked at the code from the link in a post...

You're conflating where one ad was placed by the ad provider with how it is being displayed. The issue is in the XenForo template system which converts into HTML code, but does not grant me access to the pure HTML so I cannot see where stylesheets and the actual code would work without guessing and then seeing if it still is an issue.

 

[Michi]

Sometimes, software like this (even in some cases, social media sites) will take the first image that it sees and tries to include it in the presentation for a link. This has happened to me in the past where if someone posts the recnet.com main website, the image they see is an ad for Cirrus Streaming. Depending on the software that is displaying the site (in this case, XenForo), it may look at the meta tags on the linked to website for a default image and if a URL is listed there, it will use that image instead. This is just an issue that we have to deal with because not everyone designs their pages the same way and some may choose to integrate default images and some do not. This functionality may also be limited by the Content Management System (CMS) software on the other end.

I have been experimenting on Google AdSense on a non-broadcast site which I use for testing certain products (such as mapping) which may find its way to the REC broadcasting space, and honestly, I find the methods Google uses to be downright annoying.

REC has not implemented AdSense within our broadcast space. I will accept advertising, but only as part of a comprehensive affiliate program that I have specifically negotiated into, revenues based on generated sales and a landing page on the advertiser's end so that referred sales can be properly tracked. In addition, I will only accept sponsors that provide products and services that are relevant to the subject matter within the scope of radiocommunications or broadcasting, does not conflict with REC provided services or with certain product lines for where REC has special relationships with another vendor. So far, we have only one arrangement and that is with Cirrus Streaming. There are others who may come on, once they can provide the proper tracking infrastructure. I will not sell out REC to the junk ad networks.

 

[Negin]

Without knowing ad provider and board system, I have no way of knowing whether this is applicable. It seems that board was using Google Adsense's AutoAds.

We're not using that here. Everything is placed in templates, but because they were setup years before I got involved its a matter of checking a lot of code I know nothing about. I have changed some that I hope stop this from happening, but I'm flying blind.

The board system is the same as here, Xenforo. The board wasn't using Google, but another provider. They posted some update to a plug-in caused the ads to go rogue. When their XF code expert came back after camping, he reworked some stuff to keep the ads tamed. Since I'm a Mod there, it was mentioned in the "Mod Room" that he pulled 612 hairs out.

 

[yeoldeschool]

@lanceventa - Please forgive my hasty diagnostic. When I examined the code of the radiodiscussions.com post, I mistook the image linked in that quote as the ad without noticing there was a second, Salem Media Group image right there beside it -- and that the link I was seeing was for that Salem logo, not the ad. I glanced at the posted screen capture way too fast, and my entire response ended up being for nothing because of it. I'm sorry I wasted your time with the false alarm!

P.S. I know you run a very fine radio news site and did not think InsideRadio was an ad provider. It just mistakenly appeared to me that InsideRadio had an ad provider of its own, and that XenForo was picking up that ad provider's ads from insideradio.com's HTML code, and transplanting those ads here.

 

[Greg Goodfellow]

Speaking ONLY for me…WHATEVER it takes to keep this board viable works for me. I so appreciate the many years of learning from some very-talented people.