No banner ads

CopperCopper
edited March 2005 in Science & Tech
This may seem odd, but I do not get banner ads displayed on web pages. I had the HSA malware and got rid of it from the short media guide posted on your web page. I may have deleted something from the HJT log. I was not concerned at first, but now it is getting kind of annoying. I have tried changing some of the settings (privacy settings: medium, high, low, etc.) in IE with no change and have even tried using FireFox, but the same thing would happen in their browser also. Can anyone help with this annoying problem. :confused: Thanks in advance.

Comments

  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited March 2005
    Lemme get this straight.
    You are not getting banner ad's and are somehow concerned?

    Did you do something in your HOSTS file? You might have added a bunch of sites or something and now anytimes those sites try coming up, it's just being redirected to the localhost.

    Other then something along those lines I don't know.
  • DexterDexter Vancouver, BC Canada
    edited March 2005
    Did you at any point install a custom HOSTS file? If you used the from MVPS.org, their HOSTS file blocks all syndicated ads, including the Google ads that help to make sites like Short-Media financially able to operate.

    Let's check your HOSTS file:

    Open Hijack This, from the main screen click on CONFIG. Then click on MISC TOOLS. Click the button that says OPEN HOSTS FILE MANAGER. When that opens, click OPEN IN NOTEPAD. Copy and paste the contents of that Notepad doc here, or if it s very long, save it as a txt file on your desktop, and add it as an attachment.

    Dexter...
  • CopperCopper
    edited March 2005
    Dexter,
    Thank you for repling to my post. I apprecitate you trying to help even though this seems like kind of a ridiculous post. It is just kind of annoying and sometimes it seems to screw things up. For example, when I am surfing the internet and press the back button, I will have to repeatedly "hit" the back button to go back to the previous page. When this is happening, I can see that something is happening sometimes but the previous page does not come up until repeated "hits" of the back button.

    I am sending the host file as an attachment because it seems to be kind of long. I hope this will help.

    P.S. One more thing...my yahoo homepage usually has a banner ad at the top and sometimes it displays the ad and sometimes does not??? When it is not there, I see the IE verbage that comes up when a page is not displayed (this is what is really kind of annoying). I hope some of this info will help. Thank you in advance. Copper
  • DexterDexter Vancouver, BC Canada
    edited March 2005
    Well, somewhere along the line, you (or a program you used for cleanup) definitely installed some custom HOSTS entries which block ad serving sites. Pretty much every entry in your HOSTS file is for an ad service.

    The problems you have loading some pages are due to the way some sites structure their content. They load the page content AFTER the ad servers send their ads. Because you have the ad servers blocked, the ads never load, so those pages never load.

    Same with your Yahoo home page. Depending on where the ad is being served from, if it is in your HOSTS list, it will be blocked. If it is coming from an ad server not in your list, it will come through. When it is blocked, you see the Page Not Found error in that frame.

    If you want to rectify this, then you will have to remove all these entries from your HOSTS file. Make sure IE and Firefox are closed. Open the HOSTS file again using HJT as above. Delete all text except for the first line:

    127.0.0.1 localhost

    Then go to the File menu and click Save. Do NOT add any extension like ".txt" - the file is simply HOSTS without any extension on it.

    Close the HOSTS file, then open one of the browsers, and surf some pages, and see how it goes.

    Dexter...
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