I’m having issues this morning that if I click just a bit off from a thread title, I’m being redirected to an ad site for Ascent Funding/Private loans. The same is happening from my drop down menu. (From Safari on my apple laptop).
This has been happening to me for days. It seems there are “hidden” ads in the margins of some pages.
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I’ve been having issues prior to today as well, but today seems even worse. I was trying to respond to a PM this morning and I kept getting redirected to that site.
It opens a new tab and takes me straight to the ad site.
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This has been happening for quite some time. It happens to me when I am typing a response and highlight text to add a hyperlink. I am staying within the edit box but touch the blue line on the left side.
I had posted about it quite a while ago. I wonder if the ad data is just gathering click throughs or if they pay attention to how much time people actually stay on the page. I probably have hundreds of click throughs but zero engagement on the page.
And this morning I’m getting a 502 Error message when trying to navigate on my phone. It’s happening going between new and latest posts.
I don’t use this site on my phone, but the same thing has been happening on my desktop when I try to post sometimes when the site is busy.
@CC_Jon - Today I can’t use the search function on the site without being directed to Ascent Funding. Every time I start typing in the search box, it opens up a new window to Ascent. Every. Time!
[I’m going into way-too-much detail as I figure out what’s going on. If you don’t find this interesting, scroll down to the bottom for a temporary workaround.]
The way the skin ads work (and Ascent is running a skin ad right now) is the background of the site becomes an ad. Think of a website like an oil painting. You start with a blank canvas and cover it with layer after layer of paint until you have a full picture. So we have the navigation on the top bar and content in the middle of the page that are layered over the background. When there is no skin ad, the background is blank. But with the skin ad, it’s as if the canvas were prefilled before the painter started adding paint.
It’s possible to look at the layers with web developer tools. One of the layers is a transparent border that goes around the main content area to give it a cushion to avoid just the sort of problems you are experiencing. Here’s an image that shows this layer in purple and a sorta puke green:
You can also see where it is by watching your cursor. If it turns to a finger, that’s the clickable part of the ad. When it’s an arrow, you are on one of the other layers:
Notice the ad isn’t just in the sidebar, it also is active in a small gap between the top of the content and the top menu bar. In the course of testing, I’ve managed to hit that little gap half-a-dozen times, which is surprising given how small it is. I think the problem is that other sites have subconsciously trained me to think of that space as a safe spot to click in order to dismiss navigation elements. So if I select the magnifying glass to bring up search and change my mind, I can usually dismiss it by clicking the background. Only this time the background is a link, which isn’t what I wanted.
In addition, the navigation elements don’t have a buffer. If you watch your cursor, you can see it turns into a link right outside of the box:
So I think at least part of the problem is that if you just barely miss your target, you might end up selecting an ad rather than what you are aiming for. There might be something else I’m missing, but that’s the general idea: any part of the site that doesn’t have something else going on could be part of the ad.
I think we can reduce the problem by closing up the gap at the top of the content. I’m pretty sure it would fix my issue at least.
Temporary workaround: the skin ad isn’t used if the page is too narrow. This is because people with really narrow windows can’t see the ad content unless we eat into the site content. So you can resize your browser window to the point the ad disappears:
Obviously that’s not a workable solution for everyone, but it might help if you are having problems now.
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Thanks for the explanation and the visuals. I think my problem is that the composition window (PC) is wider than the text on the page. Is it possible to create a very small buffer zone around the navigation elements?
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Thanks for the explanation Jon. Yesterday I literally couldn’t type in the search box without the ad redirect, no matter how careful I was being. Today it’s OK. But I still need to be careful!
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