Being a paid member, I only get ads on the front page. Today one was for my credit union. In the past I’ve seen PR for the Port of Stockton and IIRC Amazon ads, showing pictures of things I’ve browsed lately. No scanty females. Usually something I’ve visited or at least googled before.
Yeah , I am seeing the ads so I would say the board does not know our gender .
Is there any way to stop seeing them ??
I used to be blissfully ad-free when I used Amy laptop, but I now I almost always browse on my iPad. Is there any way to block ads on an iPad? I use Opera as my browser.
SRSLY ?
Be a paid member, OR use one of the adblockers mentioned in the thread everywhere on the Web. Plus the other devices such as Ghostery, FlashDisable, NoScript, Privacy Badger, etc. etc…
I hear good things of AdBlock Edge.
And chuck in NoSquint ( adjusts font size on each site ); IP Address and Domain Information; FlagFox, murdochalert; and GreaseMonkey, with a few GreaseMonkey scripts, just for fun.
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Become a paying member. In addition to not seeing ads, you also get to post in the marketplace if you want.
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Install an ad blocker like adblock plus (firefox, chrome, and IE) or whatever its equivalent is on whatever browser you are using. You deprive the SDMB of the ad revenue that pays for your access here, and you don’t get to post in the marketplace.
I personally run Adblock Plus and NoScript. NoScript breaks a lot of web sites, so I have to tell NoScript to allow the ones I want to work.
On the SDMB, NoScript breaks your popup notification if you get a PM and breaks certain editing functions. That’s all I remember it breaking off the top of my head. I allow straightdope.com but nothing else that comes from here (no viglink or anything else).
There are versions of Adblock Plus for Safari and Opera. I have no idea how well they work or what devices they work on.
The ad networks probably know a lot about you. They can easily merge results from various sites to ID a person. Hence they could know your name, age, address, etc.
It’s astonishing how browsers let them get away with this. And Firefox is actually going retrograde on helping to stop this crossover stuff.
But are they scantily clad?
And are you a male Doper or a female Doper?
As I’ve mentioned many many times, if you disable JavaScript, you will get NO ads here, and vastly fewer ads and much less other cruft just about everywhere else too.
Disabling JS does have major side-effects, the majority of which I consider to be an improvement. Many sites load into your browser MUCH faster, but often incompletely. Many images appear but many others don’t. A lot fewer ads, and especially no video ads. Videos won’t run. A lot of things you click on work just fine, and a lot of other things you click on, nothing happens. All the editing features in this SDMB message input box are disabled – that is, the icons in the toolbar don’t work and clicking on the smilies doesn’t work. But you can still hand-type all the BB codes and that works okay. (Being an old-tyme command-line and troff user, I’m accustomed to that, so it’s okay by me.) Web sites for your bank, telephone, etc. don’t work. If you are mainly just interested in reading the text on a page (like news articles, message boards, etc.) and don’t care about the pics, videos, and other bells-and-whistles, you’ll love it. It’s the next best thing since Lynx.
BUT – you can always turn JS back on any time you think you need it, and turn it right back off again when you’re done. That’s what I do.
I’ve been ridiculed several times here for doing this, and it was even brought up over at Giraffe. Go ahead and laugh, y’all, while I have a good time with my fast, clean, reduced-ads Internet!
The other thing to do, if you are technically minded, is to block sites via your hosts file. The location of this file varies from one system to another, but you can find it easily with a bit of googling or asking your friends. In Unix and Linux, it’s /etc/hosts. In Winders, it’s buried rather deeply in some Windows system directory somewhere.
[noparse]It contains one or several or many lines, like this:
www.xxx.yyy.zzz aaaaa.bbbbbb.ccc
where www.xxx.yyy.zzz is an IP address like 145.201.37.201 and aaaaa.bbbbbb.ccc is any typical URL like ad.yieldmanager.com
[/noparse]
To block a site, add it to your hosts file with an address of 127.0.0.1
Here is a sample of a few lines from my hosts file:
127.0.0.1 ad-ace.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 s0.2mdn.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 mystatus.skype.com
127.0.0.1 nym1.ib.adnxs.com
127.0.0.1 home.comcast.net
127.0.0.1 adlog.com.com
127.0.0.1 load.s3.amazonaws.com
127.0.0.1 tags.bluekai.com
Out on the web, you can find hosts files pre-loaded with thousands of known ad-ware and mal-ware sites that you can copy and import into your own hosts file.
I just found this page which discusses that Windows 8 (and presumably anything more recent) deliberately prevents this trick from working, by finding such lines in your hosts file and actually removing them! This is allegedly because some malware is using the same trick to plant bogus re-directs in your hosts file. Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh! But this page also describes how to get around this if you want to.
In case you want to try this yourself, here is a page with a more detailed description of the method I’ve described here, including links to a HUGE pre-loaded hosts file with thousands of blocks in it. (Note: They have now decided that 0.0.0.0 is a better blocking address than 127.0.0.1 was.)
Not on iPad, unfortunately. There is (or was last time I checked) a dedicated Adblock (or Adblock Plus, I can’t remember) browser for iPad, but no adblocking extentions for any IOS browsers.
What is your iPad’s name?
This thread is so heteronormative.