Advertising on the official download page?

Coises

What has happened to the official download page? I was trying to help someone in a Reddit thread who wrote:

I started to download it from the webpage but it seems that it wants me to add a “Safety Extension” and make my search engine Yahoo.

I asked him for more information and he posted a screenshot that looked very odd:

I made a screenshot to show how it should look, and then I realized my ad blocker icon was lit and in the shot. It surprised me that there was anything for my ad blocker to filter; when I turned it off, I saw this:

I see that the layout changes (randomly?) when I refresh the page, but it always shows something like that.

@donho : This cannot be intended, right?

rdipardo

Website hosting companies get most of their revenue from advertisers; their customers pay a high premium for ad-free hosting.

If your browser hasn’t been neutered by Google’s Manifest v3 protocol, just install uBlock Origin.

Coises

@rdipardo OK, thank you for the clarity.

I’ve used uBlock Origin so long that I never realized there was advertising on the official Notepad++ site. Only when I tried to sort out the newcomer’s confusion did I notice that anything was being blocked. I was even more surprised to find out it would something like this — crapware at best (if not malware) trying to misdirect users on the download page.

From now on I will tell people to download from GitHub. (And yes, I realize I could tell them which links to use. It’s… embarrassing.)

xomx

@Coises said in Advertising on the official download page?:

I’ve used uBlock Origin so long that I never realized there was advertising on the official Notepad++ site.

Exactly.

But unfortunately this issue is repeating: #12134 , #16324

I consider such ads to be intentionally misleading, i.e. malware.

Mark Olson

I would happily make a small monthly donation to Notepad++ if it helped Don Ho pay whatever it takes to make this problem go away.

donho

@Coises

I see that the layout changes (randomly?) when I refresh the page, but it always shows something like that.

@donho : This cannot be intended, right?

No, it’s not intended. I keep blocking such Ads, but they keep coming.
From the interface of Adesense, I can (and I just did) block manually the coming ADs with “Download”, “Start” & “Continue”… etc. But there’s no way to filters these malicious ADs automatically.

I’ll see what I can do for solving this issue.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

donho

See https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/26920/fighting-malicious-ads-on-download-pages