The point is that, regardless of how much you like the site, they don’t return your warm feelings. They use a shitty ad service because it pays better. You can’t trust this site with your computer safety - and it’s their own damn fault.
If you want to support the site, buy a membership. Aside from that, do what you have to do to stay safe.
Ads are horrible, horrible, horrible! I went to the main column page with my ad blocker turned off just to see what the commotion is all about, and I got the download popup and all kinds of redirects away from the page. Ad blocker turned back on. I have no second thoughts about using one. The ads on the Dope suck ass and I have no intention of monetarily supporting a site that imposes such shitty ads on the user.
Yip. That’s my model everywhere. (Patreon is great for this.) Well, except if the site tries to block adblockers. Hence why I don’t pay Facebook, Hulu, or Forbes.
(I’m less sure about Snopes.com. They were hosting the ads locally, which could be an attempt to get around AdBlock, or an attempt to mitigate the risk by vetting ads themselves. Either way, the ads were too annoying to not at least hide.)
I know it’s hard. The system is completely broken. As long as ads are hosted on or have access to external servers and aren’t completely open source, there will always be a huge risk that bad stuff is embedded in ads.
Thing is, I have tools to prevent the problem from affecting me, and so I’m going to use them. I’m glad this site isn’t among those who plead or try to force the issue–no amount of that will ever work.
It’s almost as bad as murder.
Or farder.
Especially at Camp Granarder. 
To address the OP, there’s a critical point that I don’t think has been made: no one here at the Straight Dope Message Board has anything to do with the actual Straight Dope column advertising.
Certainly, advice to pay for a subscription won’t help OP since the subscription only affects advertising on the message boards, NOT THE COLUMN. So OP’s complaint is legit, albeit misplaced.
The best advice is ad-blocking, if you can do it.
My devices are secure enough for the browsing I do. If I need real security, I run a vm inside my dmz. Being a network administrator I am quite aware of the security concerns and I know how to address them.
The SD is turning to shit. When your customers are having to protect themselves when using your service, you have a large problem.
Imagine going into a business and everyone is armed to the teeth. You ask why everyone is armed. You are told it is because the business hires thugs to deliever ads and the thugs might hurt you, so everyone carries a gun. Is the sane answer to go buy a gun? Or maybe you just stop frequenting the business.
The second option is clearly better. And, I suspect, the one many people will use if the Dope doesn’t stop this kind of nonsense.
Sled
People like to complain about the ads, but here’s the simple reality of it. This site is not a charity. The SDMB and the Straight Dope web site overall have to profitable.
Want to get rid of advertising? You need to suggest something better that they can use to bring in that income. If you don’t have anything better to suggest, don’t complain about the ads. Without them, we wouldn’t exist.
I personally hate the ads, but I don’t have anything better to suggest.
I could link to two dozen websites that use ads for revenue but do so in a classy fasion. The ads on the SDMB? They’re utter shit. Not only are they vapid click bait or flat out misinformation that makes this place seem sketchy to new users, they are actively harmful to the users.
I get it, California Mom’s One Simple Trick to Lose 50 Pounds a Week! probably pays well, and I’ve given up on asking for QUALITY ads. But at least we can have SAFE ads.
What are you guys complaining about? A few months ago I watched a video that popped up featuring a busty woman who was revealing Financial Secrets That You Wouldn’t Believe™ that she had discovered herself, in her capacity as a Single Mom with immense gazoombas. I was totally captivated! A few weeks later, I quit my job as the video advised, and now I’m making $20,000 a week doing absolutely nothing. Plus, following the advice of a California Mom, I also lost 50 pounds overnight. Life couldn’t be sweeter!
I believe the point here is this: there could not possibly be a worse match between the mentality of these ads and the audience at the SDMB. The fact that some of them carry malware is just part and parcel of their dishonest and predatory nature. Running this junk with the SDMB participants as a target is a disservice both to everyone who participates here and also to the advertisers who are wasting their money on a comically inappropriate demographic (not that I care). Maybe the win-win here is for management to find more appropriate and more scrupulous sponsors. There are certainly other sites with higher bandwidth requirements that manage on minimal advertising and minimal membership contributions, so it’s not like it has to be a big-money venture. ISTM that the real draw of this site is the critical mass of the existing membership (by which I mean both the paid members and long-time “guests”).
FWIW I run an older MAC and Firefox 47.0 (no additional ad blockers) and I just hit the main page of straightdope.com
No pop-unders, overs or files; just the normal routine ads you see anywhere. Although I do admit to finding the Midas Hand slightly annoying.
Yes. Why don’t you cave in to the extortion of “pay us or your computer may be ruined with malware.”?
[just to be clear, I’m speaking as a poster and not as a moderator]
In all honesty, I’ve never been able to understand this point of view. The idea that the folks who own the SDMB are trying to run some kind of extortion racket just seems silly to me. From my point of view, it looks like they are just trying to keep the SDMB profitable.
Do you seriously think that the folks that run the SDMB are trying to extort you?
As an almost daily poster, as are many of you here on this thread, I truly don’t understand why you aren’t willing to pay the relatively low cost for membership for a board that you use so frequently. It’s not extortion. It’s a fact that you are (many of you) using something that costs money to operate and then complaining when a) you don’t pay for it and b) the company that operates it takes steps to earn the money to keep it running. I myself would rather pay my money and keep things running. It would help if the daily users all paid up.
If you don’t want to see the ads on the front page and you are a member, you shouldn’t see them if you choose the option to stay logged in.
To Guinastasia’s point (and others), TPTB may want to consider that the hardcore pop-unders and drive-by downloads on the homepage are likely to hurt overall membership. Not sure if anyone is actually tracking that impact. My reaction, if I ever get caught in the onslaught of adware, is to login as quickly as I can while closing all the windows as fast as possible. A newbie may well just leave and never come back. IOW, the adware is behaving so aggressively you can’t even read the page, and is likely killing repeat traffic. It’s very hard to believe it’s a net gain.
Based on comments that Ed has made over the years, I am very sure that they are tracking these things very carefully. I have no actual knowledge of exactly what they are tracking though. Moderators are not involved in the financial side of the SDMB at all.
I don’t think intent has anything to do with it. For those who say that, I think it’s just what they consider to be the de facto situation. You are paying to stop ads (and very little else), and the ads often contain malware.
Personally, I would not consider it to be the case unless the board actually tried to get around adblock. But, instead, we’ve been encouraged to use it, which engenders a lot of respect from me.
There are reasons I choose not to pay, but this is not one of them. One that is relevant (for ddsun’s sake) is the relatively high amount of money I’d pay wouldn’t even go to the people who actually make this board a worthwhile place to post. I’d be more likely to donate to a mod or even a highly astute poster. The only way I might pay is if the board were in danger of shutting down.
And that’s where you went wrong. Sadly, the people interested in injecting malware in advertising are very clever. Even Google’s advertising has had malware problems.
I personally run noscript, which blocks scripting from running on websites that I don’t allow it to run on, and I’m more restrictive than the defaults. For instance, Google was the first domain I removed from the whitelist. If you want to show me ads, I have no problem with that. You can do that without running code on my machine. If you want to run arbitrary code on my machine just because I visited a website that includes content from yours? Possibly without their knowledge because their site is either coded badly or hasn’t been updated in eons and is hacked? Umm, no thanks. That’s the technological equivalent of eating stuff you find on the sidewalk, these days.
Now, browsing under this regime of only allowing about 10 websites to run scripts by default is a little bit of a pain in the ass sometimes. If I actually want to watch a video, knowing the specific set of sites I need to allow to load scripts to watch it can be kind of like a puzzle game. The site that actually loads the video is often loaded by other sites, which are themselves loaded by other sites. For instance, googlevideo.com is loaded by script called from ytimg.com, which itself is loaded by a script from youtube.com. That’s a short chain, that yeah, I run through often. They’re only given temporary permissions when I’m watching the video. So, if I forget to revoke them when I’m done watching, they’re revoked the next time I restart the browser. That’s a relatively short chain of websites to watch a video these days, and sometimes I do actually just go find a place where it requires fewer sites being given scripting permission to watch the same content.
Is it worth going through all of that to prevent your computer becoming infected? To me, yes. I work in hosting, Sometimes it’s part of my job to visit some sketchy sites. Knowing that they’re going to have to leverage some hack loading their code from non-executable data being loaded in a browser goes a long way; those are rare hacks. Also, knowing that I’m not likely to get fired because my workstation has been compromised by some poorly-vetted ad system and since has been found to be compromising our customer’s data is pretty valuable to me, as well. I’ve only personally known that to happen once, in what probably amounts to the dark ages of the internet now, but I’ve seen someone get fired because of that.
Yep, the web often looks like it’s stuck in 2000 to my browser. Even then, the majority of sites are functional for my purposes without giving them permissions to run scripts. I was shown lots of ads in 2000, and they were mighty annoying. They could fall back to that tech when they’re blocked from running scripts, for example Google gives me no grief on their search page without scripts being allowed, but for what ever reason the ad providers don’t. That’s not my fault or problem.
TL;DR: You expected a chain of instructions provided to you by what amounts to a random list of people who paid for a chance to get on your particular list to be always perfectly usable and not cause you harm, given human nature? Ok, good luck with that.
I’m using Adblock on Chrome on a Mac, and it’s working well for me.
I’ve completely stopped checking this site from work, because my work computer is not adequately protected against whatever nastiness this site’s ad vendor runs. This is the ONLY site I regularly frequent that I won’t use from my employer’s computer. (no, I don’t view porn on my own computer, either.)
Well, it’s advertisers are certainly dangerous lowlifes of some sort. That’s the problem, not the existence of ads.
Most every site has ads. I don’t need to avoid them when using my work computer. This place has WORSE ads. Ads that are embarrassing to have on your screen, ads that run sketchy scripts. That’s what the holier-than-thou paid members don’t understand. This place is much worse than the typical site that a user of this site might visit.
No, but some of the paid subscribers talk as if that is the normal relationship between a site and its viewers.
I’m pretty sure the owners of this site have just made a horrible mistake, and hired a really bad internet advertiser, because it promised them a nice payout. And I’m pretty sure that deal is hurting the site, because I can’t imagine the site is getting many new members, paid or otherwise. At least, not the sort of new members who write the stuff that attracts other members.
I use a lot of ad-funded sites. Usually, I see ads for stuff I’ve googled recently (I just bought a lamp, no, I don’t want another, or another, or…) or for movies or cars or video games. Sometimes for local stuff, or slightly sqicky stuff like a service to snoop on your friends. Most just display ads on the side of the page, or intersperse them amongst the content. Mildly annoying, but hey, I suppose it pays for the site. This site shows uniquely unattractive (to me) ads, and is the only site I frequent that sets its ads to run stuff, create popunders, and similar.
And I believe that is a problem for the site.
Well, they’re serving up malware and the proposed remedy is to give them money to make them stop, so call it what you like.
I’m a paying member and adblock user, so it doesn’t affect me in the least, but “we need to infect your computer to keep the lights on” is a pretty horrible argument. Anything short of disassociating themselves from ad services that are known malware vectors is a clear statement that the Straight Dope is, at best, callously apathetic toward their userbase. I’ve never been one to kvetch about the administration or modding here, but continuing to allow the site to be used to distribute malicious code to visitors is simply indefensible, and I’m rather perplexed by the attempts to defend it.
Another message board I used to frequent on a daily basis with a much smaller user base avoided adds and instead, requested donations from users to cover the operating costs. Has this model ever been used/discussed/considered?
That site wasn’t trying to make a profit so the situation is slightly different but even if they decided to go with a lower-paying, more user friendly Ad Service and shore things up with donations and member fees, I would think there’d be enough to turn a profit (although honestly I have ZERO idea what type of compensation is received from Ad Services so I may be way off base).
I mostly lurk - post every once in a while - but I’d happily fork over $10 or $20 to keep the site going and I can’t imaging I’d be the only one. There is also a much larger user base here so I would think that donation could certainly make up the difference between the current ad service and a less obtrusive one.