I'm not sure if I was just dense before but since when did the PK Fanfic site have ads in the main page? Or was this just a new thing?

I think its a new thing, it seemed weird to me when I came back today.

Odd. I'm seeing it too. Only I don't think it was a new thing that was added in . . .

You guys aren't imagining things. We did add one there. It's only for testing at this stage.

Banner Ads are great for site admins, and users alike - as long as they aren't going to sneak in and install evil applications. Google ads aren't like those other ones that infect your machine, and you never see the end of the popups. These are just TEXT ads. It's one of " nice " ones out there, and you might have had seen them on MuggleNet, or other big sites. They give us money for people clicking on the banner.

We're just testing it out to see if we make any money at all ^.^ If we do, we put it towards to the portkey funds. It will help with site costs, and it would mean that the site will be further independent from fiancial contribution from the admins. We're in the process of updating the entire server's layout. And once done, it will be at the very bottom of the pages. So it wouldn't even be an eyesore to people.

The money - IF WE MAKE ANY - would most likely go on a remote backup solution. That way anything goes wrong on the server - we can be backonline in a few days Don't try to cheat the banners or anything, they know if you try that.

Ah, now I see. Thanks for clearing that up, NAPPA. So whenever you click on a banner/visit a website that Google is advertising, money is put into Portkey's fund?

Actually I think more like if a sale is made by clicking and visiting one of the sites, that's when money is made.

There is no SALE involved. If you see something , and buy it , portkey gets no more or less money than if you don't buy it. However, the google ad machine is smart - so if you try to cheat and give portkey money - it will stop counting hits from you. You actually have to browse the site a little bit you end up in. So don't do anything like that.

for some reason when I try to click on the ads they don't go to the websites. is anyone else having this problem of the links just not doing anything?

Where do they end up going when you click 'em?

Man, am I glad to hear that this is actually PART of the website.

See, I've just come through a three day long battle with some rather intrusive adware that was 'changing' webpages that I was seeing to include banner adds that didn't belong (including Google ads, by the way -- which I'll get to in a moment). Every webpage I loaded would have ads on it, whether it was supposed to or not.

Now, I caught it right away. I used different tools -- McAfee, AdAware, SpyBlaster, and manual snipping to try and get rid of them. I managed to kill it several times (in quarantine), but every time I did it would corrupt my winsock registry, making access with my web-browser to the internet impossible. So, I had to restore the quarantine object if I wanted to keep using the internet, but that kept the adware on my system corrupting every webpage I viewed.

Finally, I found a tool that would REPAIR winsock registries. I killed it using McAfee, repaired the winsock registry, and tested my internet connection. Portkey, I should note, is currently set as my home page... so when I loaded that homepage, saw the Google banner ad, I feared that my efforts had failed. I scanned my system, but found no more adware or spyware on it, and I quickly learned that it was ONLY coming up on the Portkey website. I was wondering if it may have corrupted some cookie or something, but even cleaning the cookies didn't help.

I was at my wits end -- why was it I was still being attacked by this adware program I'd thought I'd finally destroyed still, but only when visiting Portkey?

And then, I saw this... and man, was I relieved.

Still, I wish you'd announced it. I would have realized the adware was actually off my system a LOT sooner.

Sorry about that. I will post a message about this and the media section when I get home. You see, me and James have been working in the weekend to add some much needed code to the site. There has been a lot of bugs fixed up - and we've identified a few more sections that we need to do. Also we're working on a new help system. Current ones aren't as helpful - so we've not had enough time to do this properly.

ALSO : A note - I strongly recommend using Firefox 0.8. ( http://mozilla.org ) for internet browsing for those on Windows. It's much more secure than Internet Explorer. It's about 6.5 MB. It's not possible for the malicious websites, ad supported sites to simply infect your computer because you load a page that installs itself into the browser.

NAPPA

Are the links supposed to be HP related? Because they were earlier, and now they are advertising smilies and icons...



Kristina

HP Relevance : Yes . Mostly. See each time the page is served, the google ad machine checks it's copy of the webpage. Some pages it doesn't have access to - like the posting and login and other restricted parts of the site - so it gets the page with error and telling it to logon. Google being a machine will read and interpret it as the page that people are visiting. It will show relevant things that on the ad system. Since the Calendar is a member bar option at the top - you get lots of things about jewish calendar, Calendar software, Exachange tools - etc.

On the posting pages you will get info about smiley pages because it can see the smilies, and think that we need even more. Ne ways Hope that helps

Heh heh, Firefox. Firefox mm mm good. Like toasted butter...wait...wtf? Why would toasted butter taste good?

Yeah, Firefox is the best! I have been using it for two and a half months now and I'm completely sold on it. You don't get any pop ups, my biggest pet peeve, and it loads so much faster. Anyway, the ads were kinda weird, but it doesn't matter to me 'nemore. I'm used to it now.

I have a quesion: some of the google ads I can see are German. Is that just because I'm sitting in Austria, and Google knows that I therefore must speak German, or does everybody see German ads?

Ri

Ri, I think Google just knows where you are. Mine are in English, and some of them are Aussie related.

Nielle, Aussie

Ah, okay! I was really confused when I saw the German ads, and thought that I was going crazy. (Well, it might be too late for that anyway)

Ri

Yes. Google does that. Yesterday - I came across a NZ game shop address - and it had one thing I've been looking for like ages!! I'm going to be ordering it tomorrow

NAPPA

There's a very simple way to block ALL banner ads and ALL evil cookies on ALL browsers at a single stroke as long as youre using Windows.

But I'm guessing that if I post that method here it will be bad for the site?

You're free to block banner ads, but I'd rather you don't publicly post how. I might PM you about that though.

Umm... I'm not sure if this goes here, but this is the closest I think that this little "issue" gets. Is there some way you can control what types of ads you see? I've recently come to Austria, and so I get ads in German. However the ads I see... well let me put it this way. I shouldn't see something NC-17 in a PG story. I wouldn't complain, but every time I go to read a fanfic, when I scroll to the bottom of the page. I get a nice view of... well... a G-string and what it's covering (granted it's in animated form, but still, it's annoying). I'm just kinda tired of seeing that there whenever I read a story, if you know what I mean.

If you can't control what ads appear, I understand and I'll just put up with "the view" until I return to America.

~Salamon2

I think only Google can control what ads to display. Their algorithms apparently don't take into account the fic content rating. There are ways around this but I'd rather that users research them on their own than state them here.

Of course you'd say that... !! *grumbles and goes off to find out how its done*

~Salamon2