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Posted by Overmod on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 1:47 PM

BaltACD
For a Forum that wants to keep politics and the resultant name calling away, why am I getting ads that have political conflict as their primary draw?

Karma?

 

(Sorry, I couldn't resist...)  Smile

Seriously, if you look at the 'trade press about the trade press' you will see all the ways Kalmbach Media is taking up motivating and using its enthusiast communities.  Some of them specifically involve forum participants who aren't registered subscribers (that would show up in the usual direct-mail subscriber databases.  They have 'teamed up' with a company that claims to know all about how to do that sort of thing.  

In the past, there have been several occasions where 'marketing partners' have provided malformed content that has broken access to the forums, locked up sessions or browsers, or fed decidedly unusual content to particular users.  The particular issue I have with the recent approach (since the last major 'renovation' a few weeks ago) is that it provides the users with little if any control over the content of the ads it serves, particularly in the ability to reject any particular ad or type of ad (as Google, for example, nominally does).

A problem is that each of these little joint venture partner companies zealously treasures its little algorithms for targeting the unwilling 'clients' and therefore is highly unlikely to reveal how it actually selects the ads you'll be served.  It will likely target your 'clickstream' whether or not something you clicked was something you actually wanted to see, and then not give you the option to edit or even weight the "results" of its "research".  (It may also look across other activity or files to 'determine your interests' or some other excuse for outright snooping...)

It's possible that there are staffers at Kalmbach Media who know how to reset your ad preferences, or could guide you through how to do that -- I'd PM one of the moderators with this specific request and see if they have better advice or even a specific procedure on the provider's Web site for 'amending' wrong or undesired content.  (After all, if it's the 'relationship' they're valuing, making that more responsive and accurate is all good, right?)

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Posted by charlie hebdo on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 1:03 PM

rdamon

Combination of Adblock and uBlock Origin keeps things pretty clean except for the Grand Canyon pop-up

 

Works fine for me. No political ads in sight.

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Posted by rdamon on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 12:47 PM

Combination of Adblock and uBlock Origin keeps things pretty clean except for the Grand Canyon pop-up

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    May 2003
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Posted by BaltACD on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 12:38 PM

For a Forum that wants to keep politics and the resultant name calling away, why am I getting ads that have political conflict as their primary draw?

Never too old to have a happy childhood!

              

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