The last several times I have visited the SDMB, I get a MacKeeper popup from morefastermac.club. Just reporting this per Ed’s request in the stickied thread about malware.
I will land on the SDMB home page without incident, click on the forum of my choice, and then the morefastermac.club popup will appear as a separate window on my machine.
Browser: Firefox 51.0.1 64 Bit. Platform: Mac (in case that wasn’t obvious). OS: Sierra 10.12.3.
The pop up looks pretty legit, so I’m going to download MacKeeper. Thank you so much for the chance to get this valuable application!
What you’re seeing is called a popunder. It appears the first time you switch between Straight Dope pages - the popunder appears initially, then the intended page opens over it. This is supposed to happen once per user per day. These ads are meant to get your attention (which they obviously do) but are less intrusive than some other approaches. In any case, they’re not malware.
If it’s not malware, MacKeeper is at least in an extremely grey zone. It (and its ads) have been the target of a number of lawsuits aimed at its ineffectiveness, false alarms, and highly deceptive marketing practices. This isn’t the “Symantec Antivirus for Mac;” it’s something much less obviously benevolent.
Thank you for the explanation, Ed. It actually was the fact that it was MacKeeper that made me think it was malware, as that’s the only pop-unders I have gotten, so hopefully some ads with babes in bikinis will take its place soon!
Time and Charlie, I think Ed intended “they” in your quoted bit to refer back to “the ads” rather than MacKeeper.
Bikinis would be nice. I get smart pill pop-unders. I can’t believe someone went to the time and trouble to put that ad together, and pay the SDMB for hassling us with. I’ll eat my hat if even one doper buys that product in the next 12 months. Who comes up with these schemes?
I’ll disagree with that, Ed. Anything that opens a window on my computer without my initiation of the opening is malware. And the SDMB should not be taking advertising from companies that do that sort of thing.
On my iPad it’s the Smart Pill, and when I’m browsing with cookies turned off Smart Pill makes SDMB a painful, pissant little website. It’s painful that it opens new tabs repeatedly, but its worst sin is that when I click on a SDMB link to an outside site my SD tab gets closed – I have the Smart pill tab and the outside link. But no SDMB.
Hitting the back arrow on the Smart Pill tab will return me to the Dope.
Yeah, I’ve no right to expect a usable interface if I browse with cookies turned off, but of the dozen sites I frequent, SDMB is the only one that is seriously obnoxious to use without cookies. The browser will have 5 or 6 Smart Pill tabs open after 15 minutes of message board reading.
I can put up with it, but if I was visiting for the first time I wouldn’t want to hang around.
