Community
    • Login

    Fighting Malicious Ads on Download Pages

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Security
    6 Posts 3 Posters 164 Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • donhoD
      donho
      last edited by donho

      Here is the response regarding the malicious ads on download pages.

      Ref:

      1. https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/26890/advertising-on-the-official-download-page
      2. https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/12134
      3. https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/16324

      You’ve certainly seen the ads that use words like “Download”, “Install”, “Start”, “Continue”… etc on Notepad++ download pages.
      While not all of these ads are malware/adwares, most of them are. Of course, it’s not intentional on my part - the title “Download Notepad++” unfortunately attracts such ads, and there’s no automatic way to filter the ads in question via Adsense. There are 2 ways to block them manually from Adsense’s interface: the first is to check all incoming ads and ban those with the keywords mentioned above one by one; the 2nd way is to ban the domain name (up to 500 domains).

      To prevent such ads from appearing on the download pages, I try to ban the malicious ads using both 2 methods twice per month: by blocking the malicious ads individually (the 1st method), I also block their root-level URLs (domain name) using the 2nd method.

      However, what I have done is clearly not enough. The frequency of blocking malicious ads will be increased to once per week.
      Additionally, since my location is fixed in France and these ads target global audience, if you encounter any ads that try to mislead users (using the keywords mentioned above), please click on them and post their URL here - I will block them for sure.

      The download pages have also been improved (with bigger and eyes-attrcted download image; also the ads are separated from the content) to reduce the confusion, in case these malicious ads persist:

      029fd0a6-dcdc-4e38-bf0c-1fc700bd14b9-image.png

      Finally, if you are an Adsense expert and know how to prevent certain types of ads from displying, please let me know.

      Lycan ThropeL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
      • donhoD donho referenced this topic on
      • Lycan ThropeL
        Lycan Thrope @donho
        last edited by

        @donho ,
        Just a note. If the users use the Firefox browser, with the AdBlock plugin, this is the screen they’ll see, at least, this is what I see, no ads:

        FirefoxAdBlockNPPScreen.PNG

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Mark OlsonM
          Mark Olson
          last edited by

          I still see ads with the word “Download” on Microsoft Edge.

          I agree with other posters elsewhere that the real solution (for ads in general) is to use Firefox with UBlock Origin installed.

          80cfe798-79b0-41f5-902b-c844590778ff-image.png

          donhoD 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • donhoD
            donho @Mark Olson
            last edited by donho

            @Mark-Olson

            I still see ads with the word “Download” on Microsoft Edge.

            As I said above:

            The download pages have also been improved to reduce the confusion, in case these malicious ads persist:

            Additionally, since my location is fixed in France and these ads target global audience, if you encounter any ads that try to mislead users (using the keywords mentioned above), please click on them and post their URL here - I will block them for sure.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • Mark OlsonM
              Mark Olson
              last edited by

              @donho
              Right, sorry for missing the part where you asked me to list the offending URLs.

              In the past few minutes of visiting the Download pages on Edge with no ad blocker, the only sites I noticed placing ads with “Download” links were:

              https://download.driversupport.com/
              https://lp.jetbrains.com/intellij-idea-http-client/
              https://allmanualsreader.com/manuals/
              https://pdfonestart.com/pdf
              https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/
              https://convertpdfplus.com
              
              donhoD 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • donhoD
                donho @Mark Olson
                last edited by donho

                @Mark-Olson
                Thank you.
                The 6 URLs have been blocked on their root level.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • First post
                  Last post
                The Community of users of the Notepad++ text editor.
                Powered by NodeBB | Contributors