So many of the click-bait ads feature bikini clad females. Just wondering.
Do females get the same?
Well, it’s a long time since I saw adverts on the web, but those sound almost tempting enough to allow.
Almost.
I don’t think it’s the board itself. There are probably tracking cookies on your system from previous web sites you’ve visited that allow the ad-ware to figure out things about you (like your gender) and serve out targeted ads.
Right now Ghostery is listing 9 trackers on SDMB (was 7 before I started to reply).
Adblade, Chartbeat, eXalate, Google Analytics, Quantcast, Rubicon, Scorecard Research, Taboola, Viglink.
Between them they are going to have a ridiculously good idea about who you are. Serving ads based upon your sex is about the lowest common denominator of their capabilities.
Moderator Action
Since this is a question about the SDMB, let’s move this to ATMB.
Moving thread from General Questions to About This Message Board.
What makes that sort of thing extra fun at my household is that my spouse and I share the same computer and we have different interests. I do think we sometimes confuse the cookie-trackers.
Could you give us the URL’s of those trackers so I can make sure I have them in my blacklist?
Your gender is known as well as that thing that happened with the girl who was reaching for the Ro-Tel at SafeWay.
Use ccleaner and Glary Utilities to clean your system of crap. Then using Chrome or Firefox for all of your web needs, install two tools:
[ul]
[li]AdBlock Plus[/li][li]EFF Privacy Badger[/li][/ul]
No more ads, no more tracking.
The battle is not always to the strong nor the race to the swift, but that’s the way to bet it.
When in doubt, bring boobies.
b.scorecardresearch.com
cdn.vigilink.com
edge.quantserve.com
insight-s3.exelator.com
static.chartbeat.com
tap-cdn.rubiconproject.com
some of these may be analytics and not trackers, but all of them are unnecessary to the proper functioning of SDMB.
It has pics of your gender. That’s what happens when you surf the net without your bathing suit on.
I also am pretty sure that assuming you are male is the default for these types of ads.
Thanks, Construct. I’ve blocked a whole slew of non-preferred URL’s by adding them as dummy entires in my hosts file. Now I’ll check which of these need to be added too.
Has anybody (specifically, anybody of female characteristic) answered the OP’s direct question?
Do female board users get the same ads as male board users, and in particular, ads featuring pics of females in scanty attire?
If so, what is your attitude about these ads? Do you find them offensive?
(Me: No, I don’t get ANY ads on this site, but on the infrequent occasion that I do (when I occasionally have JavaScript enabled) I find them annoying, but I so ignore them that I don’t even know what they have pictures of. When I do notice pics of females in scanty attire, an apparent attempt to entice male users, myself presumably included, into clicking there, I find that offensive.)
And BTW, I notice that several of those URL’s include “cdn” in them somewhere. Those can get particularly annoying, as those cdn sites (which I think are all really just one site by many names) are often slow to respond, and the web pages are coded so that your browser waits for those responses, often indefinitely long. Blocking them seems to have no undesirable effects (as far as I can tell).
I’ve mentioned earlier the problems AdBlock Plus has with bloating Browser memory; unfortunately the replacement, AdBan stopped working a few weeks ago, and the extension makers seem to have gone.
Using an old version of Firefox, some extensions aren’t optimal, but at present UBlock Origin works well ( and I also have AdGuard, but not for this version so don’t know if it’s working and, of course Ghostery and the rest of the usual suspects ).
Also, possibly vainly, I blocked the unbearable online content aggregation [ You May Be Interested In This ] sites directly in LeechBlock because I hate them so. More than ordinary advertising. And I think ordinary advertisers should be taken outside and shot.
Mine shows pictures of Einstein, Marie Curie, Stephen Hawking, Gerard 't Hooft and Frank Wilczek.
Holding fleshlights?
Lightsabers.