Have some things changed lately about how this board works?

About This Message Board
1

Starting yesterday (12/5/2012) or so, I noticed a few mildly annoying changes in how this board works. Have the mods installed some upgrades or patches or something?

(1) I run my browser with JavaScript disabled (as I’ve mentioned many times). One of the results is that I NEVER see any ads here on SDMB. Until yesterday. Then, some ads have started showing up. (The ones just below the first post on the page.)

(2) When I type a new post (at the end of an existing thread) and click Submit, it used to display the thread, with the new post, positioned at the post I just made. Now, it displays the thread positioned to the top of the page, and I have to scroll all the way to the bottom to get to the post I just posted. (Although I’m not sure if I’ve seen it do this all the time or just most of the time.)

What has changed in the SDMB behind-the-scenes to cause these changes?

2

We haven’t changed anything. My guess is that this has to do with your browser settings.

3

Something with the ads changed. My adblocker no longer blocks ads from adfusion, no matter what convoluted procedures I try to make it so.

I can’t even filter the images in the ads anymore either (the first two worked, but none afterwards).

4

Data point: I haven’t seen ads from here. Win 7, Firefox with Adblock and Noscript. Tried it on a Linux machine (Ubuntu 12.04), same Firefox setup, and no ads there.

5

This. I’m seeing the adfusion ads. Well, I was anyway. I blocked them by putting that 127.0.0.1 trick into my /etc/hosts file: (ETA: Windows users: Dig deep enough in your system directory, and you can find this file too. The same trick should work for you.)


# Block unwanted spam sites:

127.0.0.1    www.adfusion.com
127.0.0.1    yp.adfusion.com

But, now in place of those ads, I get this message in rather large font:

(That happens because, as a matter of fact, I have an apache server running on my own mochine here, so it responds to that.)

I have no idea what might have changed in my own browser settings, and no reason to suspect that anything has changed.

6

Nothing changed in my browser either. I haven’t visited this site since September until last week, but last week I was seeing no ads. I see the adfusion ones now, every time.

7

Could the guest/member be making a difference? If I’m not getting served ads in the first place, my data point should be thrown out.
ETA: I just logged out and opened a bunch of threads. I saw the same “advertisements” text with the empty, single-row grey bar, but that’s it.

8

It probably depends on the browser and adblocker for that browser. I’m using IE7Pro adblocker for IE8 and the new ads are clever enough to bypass it. And don’t say use FF as I hate its UI.

9

Missed the edit, but it also seems the site is crashing my browser quite often by not letting me back to an earlier page or click on links.

10

I’m not seeing ads but yesterday and today I had to log in. I never log out, so that was weird.

11

Yeah, a couple of times last week it didn’t ‘remember me’ and I had to log in, (and go search out my password!).

But I figured it was just me.

12

Data point: my adblock is working fine in Chrome. I’m not seeing the adfusion stuff.

13

I have noticed something of a change as of a few days ago - I’m using Chrome with Adblock Plus, and while I haven’t started seeing any ads, I am now occasionally briefly seeing a placeholder at the top of the page (“Chrome has blocked this page from loading blah blah blah,” it’s gone too quick to catch the entire message) and then, when I hit the back button, I have to hit it twice, as if the page is in my recent history twice. Since this started around the same time as the other problems reported here, it sounds like this might also be due to whatever new thing Adfusion is doing.

14

In my experience, the ad that appears beneath the first post was always served from ad.doubleclick.net until sometime in the past week or so, when it changed to www.adfusion.com. The SDMB administration may not have consciously changed anything, but that ad iframe’s URL has definitely changed.

15

I saw a couple of ads one day recently, until I added them to my AdBlock filter. Poof, gone.

16

I wonder if some of the ads are switching to HTML5 and that’s throwing the blockers off.