Misleading ads?

[Dooz]

Recently browsing the forum on my ipad and i get this quite misleading advertisement saying ( Get the app! )

Or (download now) what if someone thinks its a download for ksp!

Another very misleading ad saying (download mod) and appears when I'm looking at the mod section.

At least say what it is advertisers!.

[Kerbart]

The one about "view messages" is especially annoying as it is in the same area as where you're looking for notifications,

[OdinYggd]

Can you provide screenshots of the offending ads if you come across them again? Take care not to click them by mistake- this is not allowed.

It has been noted and will be brought to the attention of the relevant people, but I am not sure how much they can do about it.

The ads are automatically generated by the advertising network in order to attempt to best-fit the content being viewed, factoring in things like user preferences and other places the ad network has seen you on. It is not directly controlled by squad- although I do believe they can prevent certain ads from running if there has been some found to cause problems.

Screenshots of the offending ads would be best so that the misleading ads can be removed from the rotation and feedback left with the ad provider to discourage that type of ad.

[Kerbart]

Here's the offending "view messages" ad that I've clicked a couple of times before I caught on. Yes, we're all rocket scientists here and if you pay attention you'd "obviously" see it's an ad. Or not?

[Dooz]

Heres one of the ads i got.

[MC.STEEL]

I hate these stupid ads,they dont even advertise your dumb products,its just a digital well with a ''something is in it'' sign over it if you jump in in it leads to an ad for a browsergame, some badly layed out site offering whatever the hell no one wants,a program that no one in a million years would use,maybe a get a free ipad page or just outright gives you a virus.

An addblock program is usualy enough to stop these eye sores of human arrogance once and for all,but WHY are they here in the first place.

Edited February 16, 2014 by MC.STEEL

[Tex_NL]

... but WHY are they here in the first place.

Why? That's easy: MONEY!

Every ad that gets displayed and especially those that get clicked will generate income for SQUAD. It's only a few cents per ad but with large amounts of visitors it adds up quick.

P.S.

Without this topic I wouldn't even know there where ads on the forum. I run ABP on FireFox. No annoying ads and no nasty pop-ups.

[Kerbart]

An addblock program is usualy enough to stop these eye sores of human arrogance once and for all,but WHY are they here in the first place.

Running a forum can be very expensive, especially when there is a good amount of users and more so if the user base is distributed globally. You'll need somebody to keep things running (not the mods, that's content. I'm talking about when the site goes down for whatever reason). You'll need hardware that runs 24/7 (it's amazing how quickly things break when they don't get one minute of downtime), reliable forum software is expensive and needs to be updated on a continuous basis (because of virusses and malware) and bandwidth isn't, contrary to what many think, free either.

I have no problems with ads. They help providing a service for free that wouldn't be there (or that needs to be paid for otherwise). And when those ads are well behaved, like the ones I see right now (did Squad complain with the Ad provider?) I have nothing against it. It's when ads try to draw clicks by pretending to be something different than they are that I dislike, not ads in general.