Please excuse the ludicrous Google Ads
 

You know the ones...

"Hydrogen Car Exposed!!"

"Run your car on WATER!!"

Yes they're embarrassing, and I've set up the Google account to filter them out, but it's taking its sweet time getting the job done.

I'll be sadly disappointed if it turns out they're the only ads Google thinks is suited to the site!

I actually made a donation yesterday to get rid of that exact ad...

Seriously, I made a donation cause the information I found on this site has been invaluable, but I have to agree this add is somewhat embarrassing.

Thanks, tasdrouille.

And now you've got me thinking... maybe we need to put up even more ludicrous & annoying ads! ;)

I was thinking you could add something like "A donation to this site will remove ads like this that scam your money!" right above or below where the ad gets placed on the web site.

We could do a click-a-thon :) Adsense is still pay per click right?

Everyone clicks once per day :D

They really don't bother me. I just ignore em.

I like clicking on those adds just to see what the pitch and info is. It can be entertaining.:D

Do donations make the adds go away, or does that mean you just get more:p

We need to fix out ad viewing code to get rid of them for donating members...darin?

Wait, can members that have donated see ads?

Mike made it so users who donated don't see the ads.

That's a good idea.

What's next: fuel line magnets? the "tornado"? Gain 400% hp/mpg with our secret sauce?

Haha. There's a whole slew of them. I've managed to get rid of the 800 pixel high font ones so far.

I continue to weed them out...

Done! Except I didn't say the bit about scamming your money. Some of the ads are actually legit.

Yes they do... but we would NEVER ask you to click the ads, or solicit clicks in any fashion. That would lead to Google terminating our account :(.

I wonder if there would be a way for there to be no adds for the first week of membership (or something like that) to Make to place appear more attractive (not that it isn't already my favorite forum) and keep random surfers from ending up taken.
Just an Idea

The problem with an arrangement like that is that it is mostly new users and casual visitors that actually click on the ads. If we were to do that most of our revenue would dry up.

Duh, my bad. Seamed like a good idea at the time.

Anyway, I've weeded out the worst of the ridiculous "RUN YOUR CAR ON WATER" advertisers. I'm sure there remain some stragglers that I'll get in the coming days.

There were so many of them that I'm convinced it was some kind of multi-level marketing scam. It's not possible that this many people would have independently cooked up the same stuff in their garage, and taken out ads on Google all at once.

!!Arrgh, Pyramid Scheme, run for your life!!

Also I noticed that since I've cleared out a lot of the junk advertisers, real ones have started showing up. Saw some ScanGauge ads for the first time yesterday.

They would go away even faster if people would stop clicking on them.
I read online somewhere that the more a certain site gets hits from an add then the more that add is shown on a site.

For example -
If a site give you a choice between
http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/3806/junkaddhp4.jpg
and people keep repeatedly clicking on the water fuel ad, then Google will add points to that add to make it show up more often.

It's also based on how much the advertisers bid, which I think is a more prominent factor in this case.

Heh, that would mean (in the above example) that the "Water As Feul" add competes well with GMC, DODGE, and FORD. Seeing that the "Water As Feul" is probably 80% profit on the scam, it makes me wonder just how much we get ripped off by the automaker themselves when we buy a car. So much for blaming the dealer.

Well, to be fair to the dealers, we've blocked almost all of the water ads, beforehand they beat out everyone.

What ads? Oh yeah. I use the Adblock Plus plugin. :D

Seriously. I hadn't thought of donating before this thread. Shame on me. Naughty, naughty me. It's in the mail next payday.

i have a good reason for not donating. I wish I didn't.

Re: Google ads
 

I use Firefox and started noticing Google ads popping up a few days ago and assumed they were related to this forum website was trying to get some revenue and tried to ignore them. However, some were rather obnoxious and I investigated by carefully clicking on one of the little tabs.

One click opened up a page on Google's ad preference page https://www.google.com/settings/ads/plugin and had yet another link to click. There it said to avoid their "doubleclick" ads, I could download a Firefox extension to permanently kill them. With some trepidation, I installed the Firefox extension and looked to see if it could later be disabled or removed. It says so but I haven't tried. I have suspicions Google is still tracking but at least it doesn't throw up the ads.

I also use Ghostery which blocks trackers and analytics. I'm sure Google is trying to break that one.

Why is everyone so concerned with the NSA when the data miners have a 10,000X more info? The NSA only has to tap them if they want information about you. It would save us taxpayers a lot of money by letting "private industry" do it's dirty work.

-- Teri

FYI, there are no "pop-up" ads on this site (meaning, no ads which aren't embedded in the HTML of the pages).

Google is spamming us
 

Darin (MetroMPG) says the site isn't responsible and I believe him.

If you use Firefox, there is an extension (by Google no less) that will permanently kill Google's DoubleClick cookie. At least they say it will. It seems to work so far.

-- Teri

Any thought given to find sponsors to sell ad space to vs using the adsense ones? You think the hybrid battery guys and a few others would want to buy an ad out right vs using the feeds.

I just hate the ones you accidently mouse over and a video starts playing.:thumbup:

Good idea, but that requires me to be a salesperson. :D I hate doing that.

I can confirm we've never had pop-ups from Google. We had them once a few years ago from another network, which we've since dropped.

I have absolutely no problem with people using ad-blockers. Seems a good solution for some people.