This site makes extensive use of JavaScript.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser.
Live
PTR
10.2.5
PTR
10.2.6
[Feedback] Why I block ads here
Post Reply
Return to board index
Post by
insatiable7
I had to download three adblockers simply because I come to wowhead to learn things about WoW.
Why?
Because your site is bloated with ads and it causes major issues with my computer. To the point where I can see the internal temps rising just by opening your site.
If you want me to whitelist you again, then you need to stop with the insane amount of ads you have on your website. And the fact that pages keep refreshing to bring me even more ads.
It's been 2 minutes and my adblocker has already blocked 45 ads. Oops 46.
This is insane.
Post by
Sas148
Ads are necessary for us to operate our business. You shouldn't see more than 3-4 ads at a time and no more than 4-5 should load on a full page. Those ads refresh once every 90 seconds. This is 1-2 ads less than we had as of November of 2016. We took user feedback seriously and made adjustments by reducing the number of ads, in exchange we opted for a fixed ad bar instead to compensate. We also added a one hour cap to the refresh time so those looking at the same page for a long period of time will have less of a chance of getting a bad ad, like something that plays sound. If anyone experiences one of these bad ads, or notices ads seem to be suddenly bogging down their page, I recommend clicking 'Report Ad' under the ad, and/or clicking 'Feedback' and choosing 'Bad Advertisement' so we can find that ad and remove it to help prevent future occurrences.
We also actively run ad integrity mechanisms to counter adblockers. This is likely why you needed so many to entirely block the ads, however, I would advise against using so many since they're likely to conflict or further hinder the site if they're not already doing so. For those who wish to prevent ads on our site we offer a reasonable subscription option that is no more than $1/month or $9/year:
http://www.wowhead.com/premium
-- that option will entirely remove ad blocks and won't require a bunch of third party extensions.
I'd also like to point out a misconception here. Your adblocker saying 46 after 2 minutes doesn't mean it blocked that many actual ads... it could just be that 1 ad had ~10 interactions with the network that were blocked, or it was a video ad that was streaming content that the extension was blocking, each time it tried to stream it would add a tick to your counter. It can be complicated fully understanding what those extensions are saying so I'm not making light of the number but I can say it's not really insane on a ad-based site such as ours, especially if you had a video ad get blocked.
I hope you can understand our side of this and the necessity involved. Have a good day.(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##perculia##DELIM##
Post by
brudarek
Your 'ad integrity mechanisms' need to be fixed. They cause a massive amount of constant hard drive activity for anyone who blocks ads on your site. You want to fix it? Just load ads once when the page is opened/refreshed. The reason people use ad-blockers is because the constant ad loading is a resource drain and a security hazard when the pages are kept open for a long period of time.
Post by
Sas148
Bluntly speaking:
it's hard to be entirely sympathetic to the issues experienced by someone actively attempting to block our revenue stream, while still utilizing our site, and that the attempt itself may be the cause of their overall issue in the first place.
If there is an advertisement that falls outside intended behavior then we by all means want to have it removed and will work aggressively to do so with the ad networks distributing it. No ads here should be playing sound automatically, interfering with the functionality of the page, redirecting you away from the site, attempting to download something or anything else of that nature. However, ads refreshing once every 90 seconds and auto playing video are all acceptable.
In a perfect world we'd have fewer ads with potentially no video involved at all and all of those ads would be guaranteed free of any potential harm, but unfortunately the world we currently live in is reaching 70% adblocker utilization. There's this constant belief that if we reduced the ads or changed the types used that suddenly a large portion of the 70% would start whitelisting our site and everything would be wonderful again but that's simply proven to not be the case. Due to this reality we drastically reduced the price of Premium so that users could block ads but still provide us a pittance in order to still operate. Further, bad ads are a reality of the internet, making people feel compelled to continue using adblockers, and no changes we make, no changing of ad networks, is going to make that internet-wide problem go away.
So, in summary, if something we're doing, or ad being displayed on our site, is resulting in a negative or less than ideal experience for our users then we will do everything in our power to resolve it expediently. If someone's running an adblocker that isn't effective against our ads due to our ad integrity efforts, and they decide to tinker further with it by adding more adblockers, to the detriment of site performance... well, that's just not something we can assist with. I would hope someone who has such a desire to remove the ads would find it more worthwhile to provide a $1 (or less) to do so.
To everyone here who's displaying ads and reporting any bad ones they encounter... we thank you! Graciously and completely. We appreciate you and the contributions you make towards the success of our site and the community as a whole. To our Premium subscribers, thank you as well, you've provided a monetary amount to compensate for your disdain for advertising, we salute you! To those using adblockers, we understand your desire to do so, and we're not making any active effort to prevent your use of the site... we have no intention of blocking content or tools, but we just can't promise the site will work optimally with multiple ones running and would ask that you consider either disabling it or signing up for Premium. Thank you!(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##perculia##DELIM##
Post by
Beefgoesmoo
Bluntly speaking: it's hard to be entirely sympathetic to the issues experienced by someone actively attempting to block our revenue stream, while still utilizing our site, and that the attempt itself may be the cause of their overall issue in the first place.
TLDR: We'll keep sending dodgy ads in large quantities till you pay us.
Lets face it, There has been multiple occasions when people have been infected by malware from ads served on your website, It's hard to be entirely sympathetic when you allow this to happen by using dodgy ad providers.
One of the new 'features' (Another ad platform) Stanza is also behind page slowdown, Blocking it in your hosts file (127.0.0.1
www.stanza.co
) speeds up pages considerably.
The shear amount of ad bloat you have goes far beyond what any normal website has, Lets take a look at what's blocked on a single page..
aolcdn.com
o.aolcdn.com
districtm.ca
prebid.districtm.ca
nanovisor.io
www.nanovisor.io
2mdn.net
s0.2mdn.net
adnxs.com
secure.adnxs.com
ads-twitter.com
static.ads-twitter.com
advanseads.com
cdn.advanseads.com
amazon-adsystem.com
c.amazon-adsystem.com
doubleverify.com
cdn.doubleverify.com
footprint.net
secure.footprint.net
google-analytics.com
www.google-analytics.com
googlesyndication.com
pagead2.googlesyndication.com
tpc.googlesyndication.com
ntv.io
s.ntv.io
postrelease.com
jadserve.postrelease.com
quantserve.com
pixel.quantserve.com
rfihub.net
c2.rfihub.net
rubiconproject.com
ads.rubiconproject.com
scorecardresearch.com
b.scorecardresearch.com
stanza.co
www.stanza.co
twitter.com
ads.twitter.com
yahoo.com
www.yahoo.com
Post by
perculia
There is a misconception that Wowhead's ad provider is knowingly and frequently serving malware to users. This is not the case. We can identify a few times in Wowhead's history when malware was unintentionally served to Wowhead and other non-ZAM sites in the ad network, but these are few and far between and were handled swiftly. We are not serving dodgy ads in large quantities, and Sas has explained how the number of ad units has been reduced in the past few months, and how ads now stop generating after an hour - a reduction of ads.
Our advertising provider is a perfectly normal one, and we have also switched providers several times in the past few years. So if you feel Wowhead has 'always' had bad ads...then it proves that the networks are all fairly similar/interchangeable and this is an internet-wide problem. We swapped to our current provider because they handle our bad ad takedown requests faster than the other networks.
Much larger sites than Wowhead, such as imgur, have
periodic
malware
reports
. These sites have more staff and resources than Wowhead, but face the same periodic ad issues we do. A malware ad appearing infrequently is unfortunate and something we address as soon as it comes up, but it's not an issue unique to Wowhead nor is it something we or any other reputable site, is injecting into their site as part of a scheme to get people to use premium.
Post by
korius79
Bluntly speaking:
it's hard to be entirely sympathetic to the issues experienced by someone actively attempting to block our revenue stream, while still utilizing our site, and that the attempt itself may be the cause of their overall issue in the first place.
If there is an advertisement that falls outside intended behavior then we by all means want to have it removed and will work aggressively to do so with the ad networks distributing it. No ads here should be playing sound automatically, interfering with the functionality of the page, redirecting you away from the site, attempting to download something or anything else of that nature. However, ads refreshing once every 90 seconds and auto playing video are all acceptable.
In a perfect world we'd have fewer ads with potentially no video involved at all and all of those ads would be guaranteed free of any potential harm, but unfortunately the world we currently live in is reaching 70% adblocker utilization. There's this constant belief that if we reduced the ads or changed the types used that suddenly a large portion of the 70% would start whitelisting our site and everything would be wonderful again but that's simply proven to not be the case. Due to this reality we drastically reduced the price of Premium so that users could block ads but still provide us a pittance in order to still operate. Further, bad ads are a reality of the internet, making people feel compelled to continue using adblockers, and no changes we make, no changing of ad networks, is going to make that internet-wide problem go away.
So, in summary, if something we're doing, or ad being displayed on our site, is resulting in a negative or less than ideal experience for our users then we will do everything in our power to resolve it expediently. If someone's running an adblocker that isn't effective against our ads due to our ad integrity efforts, and they decide to tinker further with it by adding more adblockers, to the detriment of site performance... well, that's just not something we can assist with. I would hope someone who has such a desire to remove the ads would find it more worthwhile to provide a $1 (or less) to do so.
To everyone here who's displaying ads and reporting any bad ones they encounter... we thank you! Graciously and completely. We appreciate you and the contributions you make towards the success of our site and the community as a whole. To our Premium subscribers, thank you as well, you've provided a monetary amount to compensate for your disdain for advertising, we salute you! To those using adblockers, we understand your desire to do so, and we're not making any active effort to prevent your use of the site... we have no intention of blocking content or tools, but we just can't promise the site will work optimally with multiple ones running and would ask that you consider either disabling it or signing up for Premium. Thank you!
Bluntly speaking, it's hard to be sympathetic to a team of people that seem to actively seek out the worst solutions to their problems and then deflect. There are plenty of websites out there that generate revenue from ads without using the quantity and refresh frequency that Wowhead does. You all choose to use some of the worst ad frameworks available. You and Perculia's double-talk and cries for sympathy ring hollow and personally I think you're both either incompetent at running a website or just lying. You won't get a dollar from me anymore or traffic on this site.
Post by
Beefgoesmoo
Our advertising provider is a perfectly normal one
, and we have also switched providers several times in the past few years. So if you feel Wowhead has 'always' had bad ads...then it proves that the networks are all fairly similar/interchangeable and this is an internet-wide problem. We swapped to our current provider because they handle our bad ad takedown requests faster than the other networks.
I wouldn't like it to be normal to have to report bad ads
Much larger sites than Wowhead, such as imgur, have
periodic
malware
reports
. These sites have more staff and resources than Wowhead, but face the same periodic ad issues we do. A malware ad appearing infrequently is unfortunate and something we address as soon as it comes up, but it's not an issue unique to Wowhead nor is it something we or any other reputable site, is injecting into their site as part of a scheme to get people to use premium.
"Other websites are worse so it's fine"
It's really not.
The fact is your ads
are
open to being filled with malware and there's little you do until someone reports the bad ones, It's further exacerbated by the ads being constantly refreshed (And no 1hr limit isn't good at all).
The fact is you still choose to use the ad providers when it's proven they continue to serve dodgy ads.
The fact is you admitted to trying to circumvent users computer protection against dodgy ads and malware, Forcing them to see said ads.
I honestly can't believe you don't understand the problem, Instead of focussing on cleaning up the website and making people actually
want
to view the ads to contribute you continue layering more and more ads (Like that Stanza bar) which bog the website down
even more
.
It really doesn't help at all that whenever these issues are brought up you (And people like panzer) instantly bring up the option of paying for Premium, It screams of extortion.
Again, People really wouldn't mind viewing ads if they weren't intrusive, Playing audio, Videos or the possibility of containing malware.
Post by
SaltLB
Guys, seriously. I had to install ublock back in October because this website was literally crashing my computer when I was loading it up.
http://i.imgur.com/cJdKGHO.png
Don't you possibly think that over 600,000 ads since October is a little bit
too
much?
Post by
Sas148
It's more than a little misleading to have us look at your single number, since October, and come to any rational conclusion about it. It doesn't account for how often you're on the site, how many tabs you have open, how fast you're navigating around and a plethora of other variables. Further, I keep trying to make this clear to everyone: that # is referring to # of
requests
blocked, not # of
ads
blocked. There is a huge difference because each individual ad could have a variable number of requests associated with it but that doesn't make it
more than one
ad.
I know it has become commonplace lately to refer to that # as some sort of negative indicator of site performance but it's simply not enough information on its own to base any sort of conclusion on. We're continually running performance tests on our end on a large scale to come up with tangible figures in determining how wide spread the issue may be but thus far the numbers are indicating a small minority of individuals being impacted overall. We
are
still researching potential improvements that can be made to further lessen the likelihood of a negative experience while also recognizing our ongoing operational needs.
Post by
SaltLB
http://i.imgur.com/KCxtYTA.png
Does this help?
I really do like wowhead, but to deny that it has serious issues in performance due to both requests/ads being delivered is ridiculous.
Post by
perculia
We're not trying to deny anything - we have a sticky thread acknowledging the issues related to Flash ads and performance issues, which links to past large threads we've posted on discussing the issue and what we can and can't do. We appreciate you being a long-time user of the site.
What we are saying that there is a difference between requests and ads. This doesn't mean that we're not acknowledging laggy issues caused by Flash Ads, we're trying to provide more accuracy/context on the numbers listed in the example. Stuff can get taken out of context easily with selective quoting and passing info around (eg 'Wowhead's pages have 100 ads each on them!), maybe an explanation will help someone else who stumbles across and reads this in the future.
Post by
jarycu
I really don't like the tone and accusations that OP and most of the non-blue posts have in this thread, but I have to agree with the sentiment. As someone who used to build websites with the sole purpose of making revenue off of Google- or Amazon-based ads, I completely understand why Wowhead chooses to use ads in the sidebar and top/bottom bars, and I have no issue with it whatsoever.
However, today is the first time in 10 days that Wowhead hasn't set off my McAfee alters saying that this page/site can't be trusted due to content that it's trying to load. I detailed in another thread in this sub-forum that I use 3 different adblockers, and when I would go to Wowhead with them turned on, I could often wait 2-3 minutes for a single page to load. I finally turned them off a couple of days ago and the site does indeed load more quickly, but the ads are completely opposite of Wowhead's dark color scheme.
Here we have an awesome and amazing site, where the staff has tweaked the color and layout over the years to make it more inviting for the average viewer, but now you're sticking neon orange & green & yellow ads that, quite frankly, hurt my eyes when they pop up. The Stanza thing, when I visit pages where it loads, doubles the loading time of that page and provides information that I deem worthless as a casual player of WoW. I'm honestly not even sure what Stanza is or what it's supposed to do...I just know there is the giant tool bar at the bottom of random pages that makes the page load forever.
Maybe it's a great thing and I just don't know what it's for...but can we get an option to turn it off if we don't use it?
I do like that we have the option to pay $10/yr or however much it is to support the site, and now that I finally have a decent job, I'll probably be doing it this month. I did that with Curse last year so that I could update all of my addons at once, and it still shows me ads. I find Wowhead 100x more useful than Curse for WoW stuff (although Curse is amazing for Minecraft IMO), and I'm so appreciative of all the knowledge and help I've gotten over the years here. I just wish there was a more amicable solution that sticking seemingly random ads all over the page.
I'm a 38 year old man, and I keep having to close an ad in the sidebar for bras. I'm single, I've been single for quite a long time, and I've never searched for a bra even when I wasn't single. No one else uses my PC. Why does Wowhead show me advertisements for bras?
Post by
perculia
Changing the color scheme of the ads is something beyond our control. If you find one disruptive, there's a little carrot option on the top right of pages that hides the ad on the page.
Stanza is a calendar/event notification program - we have a
sticky about it in this forum
. It shouldn't be causing performance issues, but a Stanza rep is available in Discord to chat - Bonsaii#4223 - or you can just reply to Saanth in the thread. It's a popular service used by sports teams for upcoming games, and some other game sites use it as well. It's a way for us to generate revenue in a way that feels more relevant than a random non-WoW ad, so we'd prefer to have more things like Stanza and less things like random ads.
Post by
korius79
Then get off MonkeyBroker and use another ad service. Christ, the woe-is-me attitude is so damned tiresome when you've stuck with that thing for years. There are plenty of reputable ad networks and you've chosen one that googling the company name brings up malware warnings and lawsuits.
Get. Off. MonkeyBroker. Stop trying to make it break people's adblockers, stop wasting resources trying to tweak it, ditch the damned thing and get a better ad service framework. It's what causes hundreds of the requests every page load for not just ads but tracking scripts and very simple testing would reveal this.
Again. Get. Off. Monkeybroker. There's your solution.
Post by
perculia
We haven't stuck with MonkeyBroker for years. We've switched ad providers 2-3 times over the past few years, and have stated so in past posts we have made on this topic. The last time we switched was sometime in Warlords of Draenor.(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##perculia##DELIM##
Post by
korius79
Then why is there a forum thread from 2012 about problems on wowhead involving monkeybroker?
http://www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=207230.1#p3284352
By slate021181 on 2012/10/13 at 2:07 AM (Patch 5.0.5)
"same here it seems to hang the most at transferring data from sv.monkeybroker.net and transferring data from wowjs.zamimg.com my turning off flash seems to help a little but it's not something I like leaving off"
Questions about writing an ad bidding script for wowhead on google back in 2014, using the "mb.zam.com" domain:
https://www.google.com/#q=%22mb.zam.com%22&start=20&
*
Edit: Checked the wayback machine for the date on that forum post, 10/13/2012. From the source code of your homepage on that date:
<script>
mbCustomDomainName="mb.zam.com";
document.write(decodeURI("%3Cscript src='" + document.location.protocol + "//d3pkae9owd2lcf.cloudfront.net/mb102.js.gz'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
So if you weren't using it for years, it would be more accurate to say you used to use it and then went back to it for some reason?
Post by
perculia
We have switched advertising providers in the last few years - Wowhead has been around since 2005, that is a lot of time for different ad providers. We have used Monkeybroker in the past, but not continuously, in the past few years. We are on them now because they were a better option than the other providers we tried out and researched as far as ad quality and responding to ad complaints.
We have recently looked into some ad providers which do not serve flash ads and have more limited inventory, but the revenue generated would not keep the site self-sustaining due to the lower rates, deals, etc associated with these providers. If you want to say "Well X site uses Y provider, why don't you" - we can't speak as to the revenue model and sustainability of other sites, it's not our place, but Wowhead as a database faces different costs and user behavior than something like a sports blog. This isn't about getting rich, this is about covering costs for core site features (database), servers, and the staff to maintain it. So for now, our ad provider is working with us to see about removing these ads, and
we made a sticky about this topic
. We're also looking into hiring some additional ad screening, and have disabled ad refreshes if you've been on a page a long time, to reduce the likelihood you have a disruptive ad appear in the middle of a long play session.(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##perculia##DELIM##
Post by
jarycu
Changing the color scheme of the ads is something beyond our control. If you find one disruptive, there's a little carrot option on the top right of pages that hides the ad on the page.
I used Google AdSense for years, and I could control the color of the ads shown very easily so that they meshed in with the websites that I built. Perhaps you're using an inferior service?
In 2 trips to Wowhead today, I've seen advertisements for women's bras and the National Advertising Foundation or something like that. I took your suggestion and hit the "report ads" button in order to close them, but 90 seconds later the auto-loader script loaded the exact same ad.
Again, I plan on purchasing the 1 year sub when I get paid next week, so this whole mess with ads will become irrelevant to me, but you & Sas148 are being way too defensive in your answers. One of you said above that yall listen to users' feedback, and I think it's time to take the feedback we're giving you and hold a staff meeting to address the concerns.
I've been in retail management for 20+ years, and I can't speak for the other posters in this thread, but I do know that valuing the message we're giving instead of defending a stance that seems to not have a proper defense might be the best solution in this case. Sometimes it's better to retreat from a battle, regroup, and reassess, instead of continuing sacrificing your troops for a cause that's not worth fighting over. (Kinda like that damned center island in Arathi Basin everyone's so obsessed with capturing....)
Post by
brudarek
those using adblockers, we understand your desire to do so, and we're not making any active effort to prevent your use of the site...
You are though, maybe unintentionally. Something in the sites code goes nuts when an ad-blocker is present and it causes extremely high constant hard drive activity in the range of 500KB/s per open tab.
Post Reply
You are not logged in. Please
log in
to post a reply or
register
if you don't already have an account.