Official "Advertisement Reporting" Topic v2

[Superjustinbros]

I can (sadly) claim that they're still at it with these fake gift card popups, they have a new one addressed to "nm.couponselling.xyz" and I got it twice while browsing TSR on mobile earlier today. (and yeah it's the same .xyz tag that these advertisers have been using to spread popups all over the site from earlier)

[Petie]

Were you able to report it using the report ad button on the site? That should help track this down a bit better. I still haven't seen any of these myself but ads are often dependent on a number of factors.

[Superjustinbros]

Were you able to report it using the report ad button on the site? That should help track this down a bit better. I still haven't seen any of these myself but ads are often dependent on a number of factors.

It’s not possible to. The instant one shows up, it deploys a pop up that on my web browser completely prevents me from clicking anywhere else on what site I was on, and there is no way to back out of the pop up to check which ad on the site caused it. You’re forced to click it and be whisked away to whatever scam they’re trying this time.

[Petie]

So it's not a traditional pop-up in the sense that it opens in a new window but one that takes over the current window? Do you see these on any other sites or just here? If it's just here, you can force your way out of it with the developer tools and then use any of the ad report buttons - from my understanding, one report will reference the entire page so it's not critical you click the right one.

[Superjustinbros]

It takes over the current window, and yeah I've seen it on a couple other sites (namely tvTropes for example) outside the Resources.

[Petie]

Have you considered the possibility that you might be infected with local adware? What you're describing has all of the symptoms of it and would explain why nobody else I've spoken to has seen these full page takeovers happening here (or why there are no .xyz domains showing up in our ad reports). I'm not saying that's definitely what it is but it's a possibility that might be worth investigating.

[Superjustinbros]

Have you considered the possibility that you might be infected with local adware? What you're describing has all of the symptoms of it and would explain why nobody else I've spoken to has seen these full page takeovers happening here (or why there are no .xyz domains showing up in our ad reports). I'm not saying that's definitely what it is but it's a possibility that might be worth investigating.

Actually, no, come to think of it.
I cleaned out my mobile browser's cookies and caches just in case and not long after, another ad of the same kind appeared. I think they (very briefly) appear as a different site the redirects to the .xyz tag, which is why they wouldn't show up in reports.
Either that or my phones and mobile devices (all of them, mysteriously) really do have some kind of adware that only triggers on specific sites.

[Petie]

No, if it's happening on mobile devices in general (never mind all of them), it's probably not you. At that point, you'd need to have an infection at your network level (something like malware somehow running on your router) which is extremely unlikely. Your theory about it loading something legitimate looking and then redirecting makes more sense. Are you at all familiar with HTML? If so you can delete the takeover from the inspect element tool on a non-mobile device.

[You Gotta be Joshing me]

I was on the TSR when a download started for a program called PC Repair.exe, I'm not sure if that was the exact name but it was somewhere along those lines, I'm glad I had my browser settings to "let me choose the directory for downloads" or else I might have ended up with malware on my hands!

[Petie]

That's a serious slip through the cracks. Auto-playing sound and redirects are annoying but actually downloading an executable is way beyond that. Were there report buttons on the page and if so, did you click any of them? If not, can you tell me what page you were on and approximately what time this happened?

[You Gotta be Joshing me]

It just happened to me again, This time I was browsing through Sonic 3 on the Genesis, I wasn't on any sheets, I was just on the game, I scrolled down and then It happened.

[Petie]

I've noticed this as well - it's unfortunately pretty common this time of the year. Again, I need to ask - were there report buttons anywhere on the page that triggered it or no?

[You Gotta be Joshing me]

No, It just popped up.

[MacG21011]

I think I found one of the websites. May not work:https://giftology.ooo/2d171b48f340dfd14d...543362202#

[Retro64]

Retro64 Was going on TSR when a pop-up took over the page three times in a row.

Here's a screenshot if that helps: