AskWoody advertising just went live

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Within the past hour or so, advertising started on AskWoody. As you all know, I have more than a little fear and trepidation about it. See Advertising
[See the full post at: AskWoody advertising just went live]

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Hi @Woody,

Privacy Badger reports:

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Privacy Badger detected 3 potential trackers on this page..

pagead2.googlesyndication.com
http://www.googletagservices.com
api.webtest.net
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I temporarily disabled Privacy Badger which revealed that it had blocked an ad (at the bottom right under Categories – for Apacer, I think – looked pretty harmless, but I just don’t like being tracked!).

The “Support on Patreon” buttons show up without any problem.

Fully understand your need to generate some income. A shame the ads don’t respect the “Do Not Track” browser setting!

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[sigh]

I didn’t realize that the ads would use googlesyndication, but I guess Google’s the 800-pound gorilla. So far I haven’t seen any crappy ads.

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Do no track is a bad setting. It is like telling the advertiser which is not compliant that you exist and are ready to become a target. I mentioned it in the other post and it is something that should be avoided.

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The ads I’m seeing are “Fix Windows Update” (Recommended DLL Repair Tool) and Repair Windows Update. Oh, and one with -god forbid- Kylie Minogue (just what I wanted to see!). I stay away from these kind of ads with a ten foot barge pole.

With Patreon woody, to support/subscribe to you, do I become a patron? I would much rather pay the USD $4 a month (or whatever you deem a satisfactory contribution) than see any ads. My personal preference for donations would be via my existing Paypal account.

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ARGH. Let me know if the ads get too obnoxious.

I was surprised to find that you can become a patron using Patreon (which has a PayPal contribution option) or by clicking the “Donate” button, which lets you set up either one-time or continuing contributions.

I wish I could turn the ads off for folks who donate — but if I did, I’d have to keep track of your user id and password, and I really, really don’t want to have anybody’s passwords stored away.

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That’s why I use Privacy Badger. Check it out: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

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I don’t mind unobtrusive ads but I don’t like trackers. I do appreciate the donate button and plan to use it.

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I can’t think of anything worse on a respectable tech site than ads peddling what is for all intents and purposes malware and snake oil.

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Interesting that the Adblock Plus blocked everything except for Patreon (I had non-intrusive advertising to Allow). I had Adblock Plus turned off for the site before, but I played with few Cookie Managers earlier and they may have reset some settings, like the one where I lost the email and user name which were normally stored from one session to another. After disabling Adblock Plus on the site, now I see the Donate button and some adds.

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The ads I’m seeing are showing up in the right sidebar and are not intrusive at all. As long as they don’t pop up over what I’m trying to read (I ain’t calling no names … ZDNet), we won’t have to sit down and have a long talk. Good job Woody.

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Tried to open (https://www.patreon.com/AskWoody) with Firefox but only had black page. But ads and trackers detected and blocked by my:

Privacy Badger – cdjns.cloudflare.com

Blur – Facebook Connect

Ghostery –
Double Click
Site Analytics
Amplitude
Google Analytics
Facebook Connect

Adblock Plus shows nothing

About that P.O. Box and checks……?

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On this page Ghostery is blocking;

Google Publisher Tags and Gravatar.

Privacy Badger is blocking; (www.PaypalObjects.com}

Blur is blocking;
Google Adsense

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OK, I disabled my ad blocker for your website and I guess I’m going to leave it that way. I have no problem with that and currently it is the only way I can contribute.
The rectangular ad and the patreon link on the right seem well-placed and aesthetically ok to me.
Regarding your patreon page, why don’t you mention in the “Overview” section a little bit more info about you and your books? (Like you do here in “About Woody” page. By the way, you now have to “update” the one Q & A before the last in this page.)

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Thanks.

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Have to run out and get a PO box later this morning.

I’ll vote, too. Nice way to kill two birds…

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I agree. The actual ads delivered are apparently derived from whatever browsing history has been stored. I used to get ads on this site for (I swear it’s true) mature women’s underwear – and the ads were in the Chinese language.

I have no idea what I did in a previous life to deserve that, but I killed Google ads the next day.

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Woody:

So far all I’m seeing is the “donate” item. Firefox, UBlock off, whitelisted in NoScript.

For comparison, you might look at curbsideclassic.com, another blog I follow. The owner recently asked readers not to block ads. The ads there have been relatively unobtrusive and almost all related to the automotive content of the blog.

As always, thanks for all you do!

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@Joe Friday,

I also get a blank, dark grey page when I click on Patreon (both when I do that here and at ghacks.com).

I use IE 11 and I don’t use a tracker blocker program (since there aren’t many that will work with IE), but the IP addresses that my Peerblock program is blocking regarding Patreon now when I click on the Patreon link from Woody’s website are several from google, cloudflare, facebook ireland, akamai, and comodo.

When I tried to open Patreon from the ghacks website, I think that only one IP address was blocked on Peerblock. I allowed that one for 15 minutes via Peerblock so I could view the ghacks entry on Patreon. It was much simpler to decide to trust the IP and to let it through for a few minutes, in my recollection.

I don’t have time now to go back to ghacks to test that (I must leave my computer for an hour; I can do it later though),
but I wonder if that means that other trackers (that are not related directly to Patreon) on Woody’s site are following people’s clicks to Patreon in order to record what happens on this site (which I don’t like the sound of, but maybe it’s unavoidable when you deal with letting ads run on your site).

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I had earlier (on the prior ad thread) reported what I was seeing today in your Paypal area — now it has changed: I am only seeing the yellow “donate” button and an image of different credit cards underneath it, but I’m not seeing the word “Paypal” nor am I seeing a tell-tale blank square that tells me that Peerblock is blocking an image from being shown.

If I hadn’t hovered over the yellow “donate” button to see what url it goes to, I would have assumed it was for Patreon instead of Paypal.

Now maybe that’s just because I do block a lot of IP addresses, and maybe you have the logo of Paypal here for most people to see.

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At the top of this thread, I now see:

“Liked it? Take a second to support woody on Patreon!”

Would you mind capitalizing your name?

I’m a bit of a stickler.

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I need to figure out a way to make it obvious. Lemme think about it.

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They do have good ads. Wonder how they get ’em?

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I hope you were serious about that P.O. Box!!! My credit cards have been breached and reissued so many times that I’m really skittish about using them online. BUT, if I knew where to send it, a check would be “in the mail” asap!

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I just got the PO box – and posted it in the upper right corner.

Thank you!

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You had the word “Paypal” up there by the “donate” button a few minutes ago, but now it seems to be gone!
Does Paypal have a button that includes the word “Paypal” directly on it?

—
Woody, on a paper check, do people need to put on the “payment to” line the recipient name of “Woody Leonhard”,
or can they write “AskWoody” —
do you have a business checking account that is under the name “AskWoody”? If not, will your bank allow you to deposit checks made out to “AskWoody” into the account you intend to use?

—
Also, you might want to put some instructions for people who might think about sending a check in a foreign currency to you — most people will realize that wouldn’t work too well (there’s a high fee for the currency conversion) but some may not know about that.

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As someone else noted earlier, the following part of your “about” page is a little bit out-of-date (it’s obviously still a public service, so that is not out-of-date!)

Q: Who pays for AskWoody.com?

A: I do. The rare advertising here is for items that are truly important to me, personally. Other than the rare ad, I keep AskWoody.com going as a public service, primarily as a way to say “thanks” to the folks who read my books.

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Thanks!

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Gack! Two more good points.

Yep, my bank will accept “AskWoody” checks.

No, I couldn’t find a pre-made PayPal button with PayPal on it, so I’m hoping that the text you see now will suffice.

And… foreign currencies… man, do I have a lot of gray hair over that!

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I use NoScript and when I clicked on the Patreon link I also got a blank dark grey page. I “temporarily allowed” patreon.com and cloudflare.com and the Patreon page then displayed properly.

When trying to donate, it asks me to create an account. I’ve never used Patreon and am hesitant to give out my name and email address to yet another website — so I just use the Donate button and did it via PayPal!

Thanks, Woody!

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Thanks, Steve!

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That’s third-party cookies or at least sites visited previously by the user if third-party cookies are set to “from visited”.

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I use Adblock Ultimate. Adblock plus sued them but lost. Ultimate blocks way more ads then Plus.

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I have checked going into Martin’s Patreon page directly (not via any website) from a new instance of everything (computer newly turned on, all cookies having been cleared) and my recollection that I described above about only having to allow 1 IP address through my Peerblock setup must have been _WRONG_,
because the following entities had IPs stopped by Peerblock when I tried to open up his Patreon page “from scratch”: several IPs of Google, Cloudflare, Facebook Ireland, and Amazon (web services).
That results in my seeing a dark grey, blank page, and I would need to click the “allow all http” button on Peerblock for a moment to see the page and do a transaction there.

When I click on the Patreon button on the AskWoody site, Peerblock blocks the same IPs as above [several IPs of Google, Cloudflare, Facebook Ireland, and Amazon (web services) ], and also ones that are usually only “called out to” when I first turn my computer on and hook up to the wifi – that tries to get through my Peerblock in the first few seconds of internet connection, when no internet browser has yet been opened. I have named them accordingly on Peerblock so I can quickly see when they try to have contact with my computer. They are several IP addresses from Cloudflare and Comodo and I had been thinking that they were related to my computer manufacturer Lenovo since they try to connect before an internet browser has been opened. They seemed to have something to do with the Lenovo “synaptics driver” (I don’t know what that is) but maybe that was just a correlation and not a causation.

When I click on the Paypal “donate” button here on Askwoody, it takes me to https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr
and Peerblock only stops one IP address from going through (which results in my not seeing anything on the opened page), which is Akamai 184.25.250.5.

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@Woody,

About the pre-made Paypal button with the word “Paypal” on it, I have seen one tonight on Brian Krebs’ site: http://www.krebsonsecurity.com

On my monitor screen, it’s about 12 inches down from the top of the page on the righthand side.

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THANK YOU! You sent me looking in the right direction.

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“I used to get ads on this site for (I swear it’s true) mature women’s underwear”

Is there something you want to tell us Woody?

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I was wondering if there was something I should tell myself….

Oh well. My wife doesn’t mind.

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Browsing History has a lot of unanticipated side effects for a lot of folks. That’s why I use Chrome with the HotCleaner Click And clean extension. I can remove as much or as little as I want, based on several user-accessible controls in the extension. So I clean up whenever I don’t want to be tracked or bugged by targeted ads.

Don’t worry, Woody. Your site has not so far presented me with any ads I wouldn’t want displayed even to the whole world at large. You’re good as far as I’m concerned.

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@Woody,

Your new Paypal button looks good, up top here!

I am just checking that you got my 2 longer comments that I submitted last night to a blogpost that you had put up last night and have since taken down.

In them, there were a couple of things that I wanted to suggest —

I think an actual Amazon button, and an image of the cover of your new book (such as the book+button display that they have in the righthand sidebar on krebsonsecurity.com), would be great here, and an effective device —

Aside from giving you a % of the purchase price (and if I remember correctly what the link for Powells that I gave yesterday said, that is 7.5%, which isn’t bad at all!),

it would also inform/remind site visitors of your book, especially people who find their way here for the first time by following links on/recommendations of other websites.

If you don’t want it to be visible on your main page template, maybe you could put it in a “new book Win 10 for Dummies!” sort of tab across the top of your screen, next to the “About Woody” tab.

(Plus maybe you could have a button for one or two other booksellers, including an independent outfit like Powells, for readers who avoid using Amazon.)

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Good idea. Appreciate the tip on the PayPal button. Let’s see what can be done with Amazon…

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ch100 I’ve never clicked on any ads offering to “Fix Windows Update” or “Repair Windows Update” or some such snake oil. The reason I did mention it was because of my concern for someone (who may be a basic computer user) coming here and seeing those particular ads they might think it was okay to click on them, that’s all – sorry woody.
So where would that have come from if I have not interacted with that kind of ad before? I can understand the other one as I do read some magazine articles online sometimes.

How then can I change the “from visited” settings in Chrome?

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I’m not seeing any ads at all aside from patreon and your book. I assume that google flooded you with junk/snakeoil (like I said) and you took them down (or maybe they offended me a while back and I have them blocked).

Given what you have seen of ads I would drop google as an advertiser and I wouldn’t be back to test them for a LONG time (and even then on a sandboxed ad test page).

Who’s the next candidate as both “an advertiser” and “trustworthy”? If you find a one that claims to match up let me know and I will prepair to add them to my currently empty list of them.

Ads like this on your website feel like a police station that (next to the wanted posters) had posted (paid) ads that read “Mail over $10,000 dollars in cash to my(whoever I am) out of state PO box and I will send you back double your money and explain to you how to get rich by having people send you all their money! Don’t think, send the money now!”. But when the police who authorized the ad see it, they see an ad for cat food.

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Google isn’t the advertiser, although they appear to be dishing up the ads that my broker’s using.

If you aren’t seeing any ads, it’s because you’ve correctly set your browser to hide them. Sounds like a good compromise for everybody.

Now, about that $10,000 in cash…

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test, can’t post

(getting a 404 from “https://www.askwoody.com/wp-comments-post.php” when posting this…)

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Google serves (or facilitates) ads many of which are totally unacceptable. Google takes abuse reports about those ads from consumers and company who’s product is being faked and sold via these ads and totally ignores them. Then the mal-advertiser (if they get kicked off) signs up for a new account and runs new bad ads, never to be stopped. Ads contain code (simple or complex) that show different ads to different people. This means they can target ads.

It also means that malware ads can go undetected for ages since they can learn who detects bad ads and serve them good ads (or just show bad ads to a small group)

There is no way to police that ads that will run on your site, since they contain google script and ad author script, you can’t deterministically review all possible ads, even if you wanted to (even if google wanted to).

A good way to allow an ad to run with more control is to run it in an iframe and remove its scripting privilege, the ad runs based on the server side generated content only (img, links, and not much else)

security=”restricted” does this in IE, I’m not sure if it is standard to any other browsers. Edit: I think the current standard is “sandbox”, but both work together.

See:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_iframe_sandbox.asp
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534622(v=vs.85).aspx

From your “Limited time offer” amazon prime ad:
iframe width=”300″ height=”250″ src=”[..omittied..]” [..misc style info omitted..] security=”restricted”

I added security=”restricted” client side and my browser re-rendered it as if that’s how it had been served to the browser.

The ad still runs fine, I see the image, the link is clickable.

I would consider an ad rendered like that (restricted/sandbox) to be totally acceptable on a technical level, and acceptable in general assuming the content advertised was fine.

Ads like this:
http://www.googletagservices.com/tag/js/gpt.js
script src=”//z-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/onejs?MarketPlace=…”
Can re-write your whole page if they wanted to, adding context ads and popups.

An ad locked in an iframe stays where you put it, at the size you defined.

(getting a 404 from “https://www.askwoody.com/wp-comments-post.php” when posting this…)

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Had to take the “<" off the script examples. I'd think those would have been escaped…

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