Yes, but if you keep turning the ads back on, then it will keep popping back up.
I think that’s exactly what happened, hence the new warning. To be fair, Jerry is probably under pressure from the board’s owners to keep the ad revenue flowing but this is beyond dumb. This is supposed to be the Straight Dope board, home of the smartest guy on the planet? I guess Cecil must be on vacation. 
Just got this warning for the first time - latest version of Chrome with Adblock plus. It was fine earlier today
This is not true. Browsers using Google’s Safe Browsing API periodically download the entire blacklist from Google. Then, every time you visit a website, its URL is checked against your local copy of the blacklist. Your browser connects to Google only when you try to visit a site which is on the blacklist, so that you can get further information on why the site was blocked. Moreover your browser doesn’t send Google the full URL of the site you were trying to visit, but only a hashed, partial URL, from which Google cannot reconstruct the full URL.
There are further details available in the Google Chrome Privacy Notice in the section “Information Google receives when you use the Safe Browsing feature on Chrome or other browsers”.
I’d had problems with SDMB yesterday, clicking on links to other websites and the SDMB page froze and the new tab never stopped searching, and then that website was frozen out of the browser, so I had to open another, different browser to read the article. I also had to close the SDMB tab and re-open it to continue reading here. It got a bit boring so I just logged out. Turned the machine off last night, on this morning and nothing, so far, bad happened except the warning from Google. ˙ʇı ɟo puǝ ǝɥʇ ǝq ןןıʍ ʇɐɥʇ ʎןןnɟǝdoɥ
Happening in Safari on Mac OS X as of two seconds ago.
No kidding. I am, shall we say, very surprised that the “solution” to this problem apparently involved hiding the malware from Google for a few days in the hopes that maybe Google will just forget to check again and then everything will be ok. This strategy does not work for 6-year-olds hiding contraband Pixy Stix underneath their mattresses, and it won’t work for the SDMB.
Apparently Android does not care what google says; no warning there.
Android is a platform, not a browser. Anyway, I’m off again until this is fixed, if ever. Have fun, kids.
Management has been notified. Again.
Thanks, TubaDiva, I do know that this is as frustrating for you as it is for us.
Got the warning again for the second time today – once this morning and once tonight.
I just got the warning for the first time. I guess I took the right days off from the board last week.
The SDMB was initially blacklisted by Google due to malware-bearing ads. We shut off the ads, beefed to the ad provider, and successfully appealed to Google to rescind the blacklisting. Then, since the incidence of malware-bearing ads is unknown but appears to be episodic, and since ads cover the cost of operating the site, we turned them back on to get an idea how frequently bad ads show up. Evidently it’s quite often; we were promptly blacklisted again. We again shut off ads and will keep them off until this problem is resolved, and will look for other revenue sources in the meantime. This is an industry-wide problem and it’s in everyone’s interest to solve it; we’ll attempt to nudge things along to the extent that we can. We apologize to users for the inconvenience.
Maybe allowing people to gift subscriptions again and to pay to restore Charter Membership status again would be possible revenue sources.
Maybe let people buy I survived the Google blacklisting and all I got was this lousy t-shirt t-shirts?
Ed, as some of the snarkier comments have hinted, this was an ill-considered solution. I’m not certain how Google’s internal processes work, but I suspect they will notice that a site which appeals their malware findings, presents as clean to get the restriction removed… and then promptly starts delivering malware again will have more difficulty in subsequent attempts to remove the warnings.
Moreover, your test (“… to get an idea how frequently bad ads show up…”) involved deliberately exposing your user base to malware, which isn’t the friendliest thing to so. (I myself browse everywhere using either Tapatalk in iOS or Chrome running inside an isolated virtual machine that gets restored to virginity every time I exit, so I’m not worried on my own behalf… but still).
I decided to help out by (finally) subscribing; my $14.95 should solve the revenue problem and eliminate any need for ads in the future.
Edit: Hey, look at that! I’m a member!
No shit.
Better yet, follow something like the reddit model. People can donate as much as they want whenever they want. reddit actually discloses how much they need to keep operating and people with the means help out. We already have a mechanism in place to do yearly memberships and custom titles. It would be a simple matter to modify that.
For once, stop being so moronically secretive for no reason, tell us want you need and give us the opportunity to help. You could do like NPR and have a once or twice a year fundraiser and be done with it.
The ownership has been deliberately exposing the membership to malware for years and hasn’t even pretended to give a fuck for years. Now that finally it’s caused the whole place to get blocked is there some sort of reaction. Any reasonable person would have posted an announcement warning us that they are turning the ads back on as a test to see how frequent the problem is. That’s assuming that it wasn’t already blatantly fucking obvious given like four years of complaints from the membership.
Thanks that is good to know. But in the variety of ways Google has overstepped their bounds as a ‘search engine’ and the previous disregard they have shown for user privacy it is a natural conclusion to jump to upon finding their greedy little fingers in yet another corner of the interwebs.
I am using Startpageas my primary search engine and loving it… They do a google search on your behalf from their servers, and return the results to you - they don’t log IP addresses, search terms, usage statistics, etc.