While browsing the site on mobile Safari I have been redirected to this webpage a few times for no obvious reason (no clicking on banners, pop-ups, etc.). I can’t imagine any benevolent purposes lying beneath such a webpage. Are others running into this?
Yeah i ran into this twice yesterday “your phone is compromised” or something to that effect
That’s not on the site, that’s on your browser - force restart the browser and see if it goes away, it should.
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I know less than 0.00001% of what Todd knows when it comes to this sort of thing, but my kid and I were talking recently about our own firm’s website and how one gets some fucked up message(s) entering its address. She says she believes it’s also a Safari thing (which we both use).
these come from the ad networks running on the forum, not anyone’s browser. restarting safari clears it for the moment, but if these redirects are still getting through, they’ll eventually be served here again.
the forum uses advalley as its ad provider and their script (adligature.com) runs an auction on every page load, google ad manager then serves the winning ad. the first step would be to alert them (advalley) this is happening and provide the url being served and time.
forum members should in fact keep reporting it here (or anywhere todd prefers), so that he can gather as much info as possible.
forum members should make sure their respective devices are on the most recent OS releases and check your privacy / safari etc settings for things like fraudulent website warning. since there are so many different browsers and devices, just tell google or any other ai what you’re using on which devices and is should recommend best settings.
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Mea culpa on this one, it IS (or was, at this point) the ad network, and I went after them hard on it, as they should have been proactively scanning the advertisers, not waiting for me to come to them, wherein they admitted that they knew about it but didn’t notify me.
"Here’s the update I promised. Since 6:12 this morning Eastern, Wine Berserkers has been running in our stricter mode. Every ad on the page now sits in a locked box: it can still be clicked, but it can no longer push a reader to another page on its own. That shuts the door on the fake Apple page whichever ad was carrying it.
The mode stays on until Friday, October 9. Six hours in, it hasn’t had to block anything, so I can’t name the ad yet. When it does, the block is logged with the ad’s ID and we pull that advertiser for good.
I’ll write again Thursday, October 8 with the two-day count, sooner if it catches something. If a member still sees the redirect after this morning, the time and page in the forum thread would help a lot."
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Thanks for the update. I’ll let you know if I encounter this again.
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this is a good first step, but doesn’t actually help you long term - reverting to the status quo will inevitably let some of these through. what they’re doing in the meantime is sandboxing these ads and the reason they don’t want to do this permanently is that it might prevent legit ads that require some complex or expanding formats. i have no idea if you care about those. point being, they (and maybe you) are incentivized to turn off sandboxing asap as it could reduce your ad revs.
what you should ask for: ask them to permanently allow top nav by user activation which will allow top level redirects only when it’s intentional. this would permanently block auto-redirects as experienced above. also, ask for real time scanning. ask which automated scanners advalley uses - they should have some upstream scanners catching these before they even hit the auction. red flag if they push back on this or don’t have them.
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"What you’re describing is what’s running now. Since 10:12 UTC this morning, every ad frame on Wine Berserkers can open a new page only when the reader taps it. An ad can’t redirect a reader on its own any more.
You asked us to keep it on for good, and that’s the right thing to ask. Our tool runs it for up to 72 hours at a time, so keeping it on permanently is a change we have to make deliberately. Before we do, we’re checking it doesn’t break anything else on the site. For example, the Stripe payment box sits inside the same lock and we haven’t tested a checkout yet. Thursday’s letter will tell you whether it stays on.
On scanning: the guard that’s blocking redirects runs on your pages, so it sees what each ad actually does when a reader loads it. Google also reviews the ads that come through its own exchange before they serve. Your question was whether we can catch these before the auction. I’ll answer that in Thursday’s letter too, with what we run and what we’d add, rather than guess today.
Six hours in, the guard still hasn’t had to block anything. The Thursday count will show whether that holds."
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if this is a reply you got from them, it’s AI-generated and dumb af. i can’t believe this is where we are it’s so depressing.
I legit am happy to put you in direct contact with them, you clearly know your sh*t
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I got the error just now while posting a new thread in Asylum.
Ugh, ok, will give them one chance then just shut it all down
I am really rather surprised to learn that there are ads on WB. Could I recommend Firefox as a browser? No ads anywhere.
Again moments ago in Wine Talk . Ultramarine.
Anytime someone gets one, please copy the URL of the redirect and PM it to me (don’t put it here as if someone clicks it by mistake…)