The advertising as of the last few months has become quite ridiculous. If this was smutworkforums.com I'd not bat an eyelid. But for forum which encourages discussions from peoples' of all walks of life... well it seems like a small percentage of potential contributors are being turned away. I don't want to see a Muslim scientist working on gravity to leave / not join because they happened to judge a book by its cover. Not sure how the advertising works, or if the powers that be at Sciforums can even choose which content is displayed. A regular example: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Ok, I see adverts are only displayed when not logged in. My point still stands though, that books will be judged by their covers; people are likely to be offended.
Advertisements are not directly controlled by Sciforums. Instead a third party advertisement system is used and it's technically up to them to either vet or provide method of vetting advertisements that are shown. Advertisement through third parties has proven a risky affair, especially after the New York Times website was exploited through advertisement by hackers. Fake Antivirus attack hits New York Times website readers I'm not entirely sure however the advertisements shown here I believe are a mixture of algorithms similar to Page Ranking on Search engines. It equates the frequency of various words applied to the keywords that the advertised sites used and also applied to a persons own history in regards to which sites they have used previously etc. (Tracking cookies aid in identifying the type of advertisements suited to a particular user, so you can suggest the adverts attempt to tailor to the user that views them.) [Minor Note: 10,000th post hit. Most sing songs and drink to such a feat, personally I ignored adding the note until 28 posts later... hurm almost sounds like a film or book title... "28 posts later".]
If you don't want such adverts showing on this and other sites in the future, then you are best editing your HOSTS file. You can usually find your HOSTS file on Windows computers at: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts If you are using a VISTA or Windows 7 computer, you will likely need to start a program like Notepad As Administrator and then load the HOSTS file for editing. Just add the lines: 127.0.0.1 ads.adbrite.com 127.0.0.1 adbrite.com This will cover this particular advertisement company. What it will do is when those domains are called by your browser, rather than querying your DNS client which gets it's DNS entries from your DNS server, the system will attempt to use the manually inserted IP address within the HOSTS file. The IP mentioned here is a "Loopback" IP address, it therefore points to your own computer. If you run a webserver on your computer you will find that the page will attempt to access file(s) from your computer just like your computer was the web domain listed. If you don't run a webserver on your computer, then there will be no response to any such requests causing the request itself to timeout. So you don't end up with the advertisements loaded or any advertisement links from that domain pointing back to "base".
