New Advertising methods on Boards

mickdw

Im getting banner ads from 48 that are very very shaky and flashy.
They are outrageous in that they create a shiver type effect to the whole screen.
How can I stop these?

eamonnq

Just a question on this, are the 'shareasale' affiliate links part of this also, as I seem them coming up when I click some links on here ?

Orion

Do you have a sample skimlink to test? I suspect that it may cause me a pita on my home PCs as affiliate providers are blocked along with all ad providers via a hosts file. Not too much of a pita as I don't use links from boards a lot to purchase stuff so I'm more curious than concerned.

eamonnq

One here ( that I posted myself).

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=98836796&postcount=421

and these (from the same thread)

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=98836875&postcount=423

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=98823158&postcount=412

Am thinking it must be just the boards affiliate links though.

Thanks for the response.

Dav

Hey there, that's not a name we're familiar with, we don't have anything in place with them.

eamonnq

I initially thought it may have been people posting their own affiliate links, but as it popped up on a link I posted myself I am assuming it is something to do with the boards links.

Dav

Nope, nothing to do with us, can you try on a different browser and see if you're still seeing it?

Gordon

It redirects via mobile, and I thought I saw 'skim' in one of the urls. First redirected to go.redirectingat.com link which I have saved if you need it. Doesn't seem to do it on laptop.

Orion

Orion wrote: »

Do you have a sample skimlink to test? I suspect that it may cause me a pita on my home PCs as affiliate providers are blocked along with all ad providers via a hosts file. Not too much of a pita as I don't use links from boards a lot to purchase stuff so I'm more curious than concerned.

I just realised this is a thread from September. I obviously haven't had an issue so ignore this post. Doh!

eamonnq

Orion wrote: »

I just realised this is a thread from September. I obviously haven't had an issue so ignore this post. Doh!

No, I posted asking about this today only.

Have tried it on a different browser and am still getting it, goredirecting.at comes up first, then shareasale and then the link opens.

Orion

eamonnq wrote: »

No, I posted asking about this today only.

Have tried it on a different browser and am still getting it, goredirecting.at comes up first, then shareasale and then the link opens.

I meant ignore mine

Dav

redirecting.at is a domain run by Skimlinks, so there's no surprise in seeing that. If you go to that domain, you see the following image:



We're not running anything with ShareASale though, I'm wondering if it's something that's plugged into your own browser? I didn't see it on the links you provided (who did all use Skimlinks as expected).

12Phase

I'm just wondering are you suddenly using ads that automatically load as you scroll down on mobile browsers on the touch site ?

Twice this morning ads have launched from nowhere on mobile safari while using boards.ie

Can you please reconsider as it's very annoying and would put me right off the site.

Boards.ie: Niamh

As far as I am aware, we haven't added anything new to mobile advertising. What do you mean by they automatically load as you are scrolling down? Are they auto-playing videos? Ads with sound?

Hollister11

What's up with all the betting promotions on boards recently.

12Phase

Boards.ie: Niamh wrote: »

As far as I am aware, we haven't added anything new to mobile advertising. What do you mean by they automatically load as you are scrolling down? Are they auto-playing videos? Ads with sound?

I mean as I'm scrolling down the page they cause another page to load and I have to hit the back button to get back to where I was.

Maybe your ad service provider has changed something ?

I don't mind ads that stay out of my way. Getting into the way of browsing isn't very good.

Heighway61

Boards.ie: Se&#225 wrote: »

Hi dulpit, it's the former, not the latter. The flavour of Skimlinks we are intending to rollout will only generate affiliate links if someone posts an actual link to a product, _not_ if the product is mentioned but there is no link. Hope this helps

Is this still the case? On a test thread I created here - boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=101272223&postcount=1 - the "game.co.uk" text is converted to a skimlinks link (but the boards.ie text isn't). On phone, not desktop.

Boards.ie: Niamh

Heighway61 wrote: »

Is this still the case? On a test thread I created here - boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=101272223&postcount=1 - the "game.co.uk" text is converted to a skimlinks link (but the boards.ie text isn't). On phone, not desktop.

If you mean are we still using Skimlinks, then yes that is still the case. Skimlinks convert the links of sites they are partnered with/have agreements with into affiliate links - game.co.uk is obviously one of those. Boards.ie is not as we're not selling any products here.

Heighway61

I took it that Seán was saying that only actual links are converted to skimlinks links. Is text that looks like a link converted too?

seamus

Heighway61 wrote: »

I took it that Seán was saying that only actual links are converted to skimlinks links. Is text that looks like a link converted too?

It looks like the responsive site is trying to be clever about converting "looks like" URLs into URLs.

An unintended consequence of which would be the addition of skimlinks to things which had been autoconverted.

The skimlinks code probably looks at anything with a [url] tag in it and converts that to a skimlink. The responsive site is trying to be helpful by adding tags to anything that looks like a URL, but then the skimlinks tag is assuming this was intentional by the user and adding the skimlink to it.

Boards.ie: Sean

Heighway61 wrote: »

Is this still the case? On a test thread I created here - boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=101272223&postcount=1 - the "game.co.uk" text is converted to a skimlinks link (but the boards.ie text isn't). On phone, not desktop.

Thanks for that Heighway61. Just to clarify, converting text that appears to be a link into an actual link on the site is nothing to do with Skimlinks, it is part of our own code base (in fact, this feature existed on the site before we ever implemented Skimlinks). So, Skimlinks will not convert any text to links, Skimlinks will only add affiliate tags to any actual links it finds on the site.

Why game.co.uk converts to a link and boards.ie doesn't is something we need to look into but this is an issue with our code rather than Skimlinks.

seamus wrote: »

It looks like the responsive site is trying to be clever about converting "looks like" URLs into URLs.

An unintended consequence of which would be the addition of skimlinks to things which had been autoconverted.

The skimlinks code probably looks at anything with a [url] tag in it and converts that to a skimlink. The responsive site is trying to be helpful by adding tags to anything that looks like a URL, but then the skimlinks tag is assuming this was intentional by the user and adding the skimlink to it.

Seamus, had a look at this as well. What is happening is that if you are on the legacy site and you click game.co.uk all behaves as expected - Skimlinks links adds some affiliate tags and then sends you on to the site. But if you are on the responsive site you get an error saying the site cannot be reached.

On the legacy site game.co.uk links resolves to http://game.co.uk. If you try typing this directly into your browser address bar then you will get the site as expected.

However on the responsive site game.co.uk resolves to https://game.co.uk. Try typing this directly into your browser address bar and you will get the site cannot be reached error.

So the issue is this: on the responsive site we have implemented https across the site for security reasons. So all links on the site default to https. For links like game.co.uk this throws an error. What we need to do is use https for all internal links on the site and http for any external links which would resolve the issue.

This does not occur on the legacy site as the legacy site does not use https by default. Again, this is nothing to do with the affiliate links that Skimlinks adds and would still be the case if Skimlinks was removed from Boards.

We're looking into updating the code to fix this issue. Thanks, Sean

the groutch

first time hearing about this, a bit shady imo that you would start making referral income off people's posts in BA without telling them.

Boards.ie: Sean

I wanted to give you an update on the case of plain text being automatically converted to links when a post is submitted.

In my last post I said that the conversion of plain text into links was not a Skimlinks issue but a result of our own code. However, once we started digging into our code base to figure out what was going on we discovered that this was not actually the case and what I said in my last post was wrong. What i said in that post was said in good faith but it turns out there have been some changes to how Skimlinks works which we were unaware of (I have since clarified matters with Skimlinks) and that Skimlinks does convert to certain text entries to links.

Skimlinks will convert any url looking text into a link _if_ the text matches one of it's partner merchant sites. So 'argos.ie' gets changed to a link.

However, 'argos' does not (as this is just the name of the brand rather than a url) nor does 'boards.ie' (as boards.ie is not a Skimlinks partner merchant site)

So, sorry about the confusion but we have only found out this change in behaviour now and I wanted to let you know as soon as we did. That leaves us with two choices: keep Skimlinks and accept this behaviour or turn off Skimlinks altogether.

We are planning to keep Skimlinks. Why? Because ultimately, it helps keep the lights on here (and the server's running, and the hosting centre paid and the developers employed ...... etc.). Yes, I know that we are making income off people's posts but the quid quo pro is that we keep a large and very heavily trafficked site up-and-running and free for all users (ultimately it costs money to host a site like Boards and we have to find some means of generating that income in order to be sustainable).

Remember that any user of Boards can turn off Skimlinks at any stage, you simply have to go to http://optout.skimlinks.com/ to opt out (note that this is cookie based so clearing cookies, using a different browser or a different machine will mean that you will need to opt out again)

Thanks, Sean

Heighway61

Skimlinks opt out doesn't work. All cookies are enabled including third-party cookies.

Your current Skimlinks cookie status:

skimresources.com: OPTED OUT
redirectingat.com: OPTED OUT

Yet I am still getting converted links.

Also, is clk.tradedoubler.com part of skimlinks or another company you deal with?

Thanks.

Foresty

^^Yea, the optout never worked. It was mentioned way back last year in this thread.

Heighway61

Do you provide the opt-out as a requirement? Is it of any concern that it doesn't work?

Boards.ie: Niamh

Heighway61 wrote: »

Do you provide the opt-out as a requirement? Is it of any concern that it doesn't work?

Of course it is of concern if not working as it should be. Seán is out of the office today but he will get back to you on this when he returns. Thanks.

Boards.ie: Sean

Heighway61 wrote: »

Do you provide the opt-out as a requirement? Is it of any concern that it doesn't work?

As Niamh said, it is naturally of concern to us if things are not working as expected. We have been looking into this and sometimes it can take a couple of days to get to bottom of things hence the non-immediate response (allied with the fact that I was out sick yesterday). So let me update you on my previous update.

As I had stated Skimlinks will create links of of plain text url-like strings that match one of their merchant sites. This is now the default behaviour of Skimlinks. However, after a bit of research and digging we have been able to modify our own javascript on the page templates to override this default behaviour and we rolled out this change on both the legacy and responsive sites over the last two days. So I'm happy to report that 'game.co.uk' will now stay as plain text and will not be converted into a link by Skimlinks. So this gets us back to where we wanted to be and what we had when we first enabled Skimlinks on the site.

There is one thing that it would good to be aware of regarding conversion of text into links which has nothing to do with Skimlinks but is a feature of the editor that we use on the site for posting. So on the legacy site the editor will try and be clever and convert anything that looks like a full url or anything that begins with http:// into a link.

What this means is that the editor will automatically convert 'www.boards.ie', 'http://www.boards.ie' and 'http://boards.ie' into links but not 'boards.ie'

The responsive site uses a different editor and its behaviour is different. On the responsive site there is no automatic conversion of plain text into links - you have to explicitly create the link in the editor

Boards.ie: Sean

Foresty wrote: »

^^Yea, the optout never worked. It was mentioned way back last year in this thread.

We also been looking into the Skimlinks optout. It appears that like Google, Amazon and many others Skimlinks will track users browsing behaviour (presumably for analytical purposes and to help them serve up more relevant ads).

Just to be clear, this is not unique to Skimlinks on Boards, it will be the case if you visit or have at any stage visited any site with Skimlinks enabled (unless of course you have cleared your cookies in the meantime). So it looks like the optin / optout Skimlinks link turns on or off this tracking. This isn't an optin / optout for Skimlinks on Boards, I believe it is an optin /optout for Skimlinks across the web.

the groutch

Boards.ie: Seán wrote: »

Remember that any user of Boards can turn off Skimlinks at any stage, you simply have to go to http://optout.skimlinks.com/ to opt out (note that this is cookie based so clearing cookies, using a different browser or a different machine will mean that you will need to opt out again)

and how many users will know this?
it's likely a very small percentage of users ever come near this forum.

at minimum there should be an update to the charter in Bargain alerts to make people aware of this situation.