[Fury]

Firefox + AdBlockPlus = Your friend.

Don't get me started on ad-blockers. I already ranted enough about those in http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,46269.0.html

[achtung]

Let me give you a dose of reality,we are in a big need of MONEY and to be honset I don't care if there is a ad to re-elect Bush senior as long we get some money to keep this site up and running. The lack of donations have forced several of us admins to pay out of our own pocket.

Like Flip said no-one is forcing you to click on the ads.

I forgot about donations!

Here, just gave you twenty bucks.

[Sandwich]

Thanks for the donation, dude.

We don't plan on getting political at all. This means that if political ads for one thing or another show up, they show up, and we aren't going to intervene. I hate to be so blunt, but live with it.

Or stop posting political threads... the ads ARE supposed to be context-sensitive, after all.

[miskat]

Complaining about the ads seems silly to me.  Either we have HLP with ads you can simply ignore, or we have no HLP at all.  No thought required, obviously, I'm all over the former.

Besides, if you sit back and calm down, shove your mind into the right perspective and think for a second, those political ads become quite humorous.

Then again, I can usually find something funny in anything.

Anyone up for changing the sound effect on the ML-16 to some nine year old saying "Pew pew!"?   

[takashi]

or "DIVE DIVE DIVE" to "VOTE FOR JOHN"? i agree, atleast the presidential ones have to go.

[MatthewPapa]

why do you non americans even care if there are political ads or not?

[takashi]

im IN america.

...

that and a good majority of people ahte a good majority of poltical candidates.

[chief1983]

As far as making money goes, I did mention that I would love to see a return of some sort of HLP store, and that I think it could be 100% legal if done carefully, and a few things are checked on first:

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,46413.msg946695.html#msg946695

Also, it seems I'm not seeing the google ads right now, or any ads for that matter.  Did someone mass click them and cause us to lose them again?  Or is there just some other issue?

[Fury]

Ads are working fine.

[chief1983]

Ok, well, I'm not seeing any ads in Firefox, or IE, and I don't have any other third-party adblock software installed.  I do remember seeing google text ads as recently as a couple days ago, but I have no clue why I'm not now.  Does it stop showing them if you've seen so many in X amount of time?  I do want to support you guys as much as possible, but if I'm not getting the ads it would be hard to ever click on them, like has been said.   I'll see about disabling any internal blocking FF and IE might do, but if anyone else has any ideas why this would happen I'd like to know.  Thanks.

[miskat]

lol They blend in real well, if all that's up at the time is the text-ads.  All black background with white text, is all.  Easily missed.  =P

[chief1983]

No really, there's absolutely no text ad on my page when I'm on my own computer, but when I'm in my school's computer lab I see them.  In my room, I just see a little maroon square, where the ad should be.

[MP-Ryan]

No really, there's absolutely no text ad on my page when I'm on my own computer, but when I'm in my school's computer lab I see them.  In my room, I just see a little maroon square, where the ad should be.

Then you have an ad-blocker at work.  Could be firewall, anti-virus, or browser extensions.

[chief1983]

Then since it's IE and FF both, the extension would have to be google toolbar.  I wasn't aware they blocked their own text ads though.  As for firewall, I have zero blocking me from the rest of the internet except choice filters the campus chooses to apply, but those are limited to plain old fashioned port blocking.  That leaves antivirus.  Does anyone know if AVG is known for blocking ads like that?  I don't recall it being that intrusive.  I'll about disabling it though.  Well, I also installed Spybot with that option about blocking known ad servers checked, but I didn't think google ads was included in that was it?

[Fury]

Uninstall google toolbar, that should confirm whether it's the culprit.

[Sandwich]

What is in your HOSTS file?

[chief1983]

A lot.  I mean a lot.  Too much to post here, it's more than 1mb.  But it's the standard file that comes with Spybot I believe.  I'll try going to the default one and seeing if that does it, if the google toolbar disabling doesn't.

Edit:  I just remembered, I don't think it's spybot, I think it came with K-Lite, the old P2P program (yes, it's been that long since I reformatted).

[Fury]

You've practically filled your hosts file with god knows what?
Oh the agony... Seriously.

[chief1983]

It's just a little hack called the supertrick, it takes a bunch of well known ad hosts and redirects them to 127.0.0.1.  My guess is that google ads is in there, as well as several CSS hosts, because there's a few pages I've had issues seeing in the past, and it's just starting to click that maybe that's why.  I'll be disabling it since it's probably so outdated it doesn't even block the current ad hosts anyway.  But it wasn't 'god knows what', it was K-Lite knows what.  And, seeing as how K-Lite didn't seem to mind shoving it to Kazaa, I trusted them to know what   Well, almost, I still browsed through the list myself to see what type of stuff was being redirected.  Nothing seemed amiss.

[Fury]

Still, that's just going way overboard. Hosts file should be used only when it is really necessary. Filling it with entries worth of 1Mb is just silly.