Has bullseye been hacked

by Rockyfarmer 3/8/2018, 5:54 am

First topic message reminder :

so I am getting ad banners over top of site pages. Just started a few days ago

by Chris Miceli 3/15/2018, 5:10 pm

Founder wrote:You know it's serious when I break out the "Founder" account....

Robert. You know how to get a hold of me....come on brother.

I think this may be a revenue generator for Rob & Co.

I'm disappointed in this. Come on.
The truth is that I paid out of my pocket to "buy" the ads away for the members of the forum. That's how this works.

If you have ever googled a problem with your car, and you find your symptom on a car forum, that thing is full of ads. Our forum is no different--except me and the previous administrators have been paying to keep the ads away for members of the forum.

The writers of the forum software make their money in 2 ways: they either charge the administrators to pay to eliminate the ads, or they sell ad space on the forum traffic that show all of the horrible popups that you have been seeing.

The forum is doing well. So well that I don't have time to monitor the posts anymore. I promoted Will Newton to administrator to maintain the decorum and for him to let me know if something has gone wrong. I think he's doing a nice job. Don't give him any static.

The ads will be blocked for 1 year at which time THIS SAME THING will happen. Just let me know. It's easy for me to see a message on Facebook. You can message me there.

Finally, I want to thank Will Newton for running things while I have been working on some of the ground game for bullseye shooters in Southern Wisconsin. We ARE making ground at growing the sport faster than my competitors are aging out of the system. It takes a lot of time and work.

I hope that my example of how thin I am spread is inspirational.

If you wonder to yourself "I'm not sure if I can host a match or start a league. I don't know how". Guess what. Wing it. That's NORMAL. Just do it. Build it and they WILL come.

Sorry the ad thing dragged on so long. It's fixed now.

whats the cost? maybe we can takeup a collection.

by **willnewton** 3/15/2018, 9:20 pm

Rob, your support and thanks mean a lot.

Thanks to everyone for their patience, assistance, and even for your complaints. Even thanks to Robert for calling me a jackass, as it did push me to keep digging for a better solution and gave me a great new rank to rotate in as my NRA Classification. Laughing

I have been on the Internet long enough not to take forum comments too personally, but I take my job here seriously. I wish I had been able to nip this in the bud a bit quicker before having to call down the Founder, but now the whole forum will know what to look out for and how to take care of it next time.

by john bickar 3/15/2018, 10:13 pm

Thanks, Rob and Will!

by Aprilian 3/16/2018, 6:40 am

john bickar wrote:Thanks, Rob and Will!

+1000

by Bullseye_Stan 3/16/2018, 9:40 am

Just had another case of anime porn show up on the banner. That was when not logged in. When logged in, that banner is gone.

No worries here, I enabled Adblock Plus with "Do Not Track" always on in Mozilla Firefox and the banner goes away (this is on a laptop). I certainly hope this is only me because some could be offended and not presented with the best of the sport. Then again, since most here are old men, maybe this is a moot point. FWIW, this is the only site I've ever had this occur. However, times change and it may become more of a problem in general.

by **willnewton** 3/16/2018, 10:15 am

Bullseye_Stan wrote:Just had another case of anime porn show up on the banner. That was when not logged in. When logged in, that banner is gone.

I am sorry we don’t have control over what shows up as an ad. That is controlled by Google, that serves the ads to Forumotion based on their internal tracking info. Are the ads you are seeing just suggestive or are they sexually explicit with nudity, depicting sexual acts, etc. ? Also, is this on all your devices or just on mobile/desktop or Mac/PC or IPad/Android? I am going to dig a bit deeper for you on this, but could use a bit more info to help me help you.

The lack of ads when you are logged is verification that Rob has taken care of the majority of the problem.

My current understanding is that Forumotion bills based on forum activity. The more activity on the site, the more they bill. That “activity bill” can be reduced by serving ads to guests so that their activity on the site does not contribute to the BE forum bill. At any time, the guest can log in or sign up for an acct. and the ads go away. In my mind, this seems to be a fair trade off and keeps hosting costs quite reasonable.

Still, it is not good to be served adult content in an inappropriate setting and I want to follow up on it.

by Jon Eulette 3/16/2018, 10:16 am

I had fitness pop ups because I look at fitness related websites. If you're getting porn pop ups it's because someone is using your computer for porn and the computer remembers it. So you might want to see who else is using your computer?
Jon

by james r chapman 3/16/2018, 10:24 am

Jon Eulette wrote:I had fitness pop ups because I look at fitness related websites. If you're getting porn pop ups it's because someone is using your computer for porn and the computer remembers it. So you might want to see who else is using your computer?
Jon

We'll! My Wife uses my computer!!! Hmmmm

by **willnewton** 3/16/2018, 10:30 am

Jon is correct, this kind of thing is mostly related to your own home habits, but it can also be inserted maliciously from a site that is not porn related.

Google search results can be manipulated to send you to a hacked site or even if the site is legit, it could be having it’s own issues with being hacked. Google is not very discerning about what you are looking at, it only knows that an adult anime site address was located somewhere in the page code. It does not even need to be visually seen by you. The next thing you know, you are browsing a safe site and Boom! you get an eyeful.

It is fairly common to use an innocuous link to gain a toehold in your system, but if you are seeing porn ads ONLY on BE forum, then I will try to do what I can to help.

by Bullseye_Stan 3/16/2018, 11:42 am

If I am the only person reporting this, then it may be just a data point. Most network administrators require crashing the system multiple times before figuring out the problem. Maybe my machine has somehow been infected? I'm doing a system scan and can install a backup image if needed.

But, this is the only site (www.bullseyeforum.net) which has these anime ads, which are kind of weird and occasionally (twice now) become pornographic. To reiterate, AdBlock Plus has eliminated that banner - so I'm good. I've not seen this anywhere else. Also, the network I use with this laptop has quite a few restrictions (the NRA website is banned, BTW) and I don't think I could get to the advertising site if I were stupid enough to click the ad - which is another mystery.

by **willnewton** 3/16/2018, 12:23 pm

Stan, you may not have to go over the whole computer, check your Firefox security preferences and see how you have the tracking protection set up.

You may need to click a box or two to get it to bump up your level of protection.

Also, you can try clearing your cached content, your stored site data, and checking that no exceptions have been added to your tracker blocking list. The preferences page in Firefox has links to provide you with more info on these settings, so it is not too hard to figure out.

You may just want to give the site a go on another browser just to narrow it down and see if it is a Firefox issue. You may just need to start with fresh install of Firefox.

It never hurts to run a scan for cooties either. Smile

by desben 3/16/2018, 1:45 pm

As others stated, we thank you a whole bunch for this forum and the work you do to keep it alive. We're happy to contribute financially to pay for the hosting. Just let us know when, where and how much.

by james r chapman 3/16/2018, 2:29 pm

I think with the exception of stan, aren't the issues primarily phone related??

by Aprilian 3/16/2018, 5:21 pm

Not phone-related for me. I too was getting banner adds when logged in on my laptop using Chrome browser. Adds on Chrome were the fantasy games with jiggling body parts. However, when I used Safari on another computer, the ads were all for Jockey underwear, which I had recently bought on line.

Not complaining, although the jiggling body parts didn't feel SFW.

by Bullseye_Stan 3/16/2018, 7:36 pm

That's similar to what I've seen. Although, previously the ads were for some bizarre dating sites that were for dating married women and some other dating strangeness (that I forget). Those were somewhat annoying (and bizarre) but not graphic. The jiggly parts fantasy game ads came next and eventually became more graphic. My first post in this thread was when the graphic line was crossed (yesterday). This was on a Window 10 laptop running Mozilla Firefox 59.0.

Not to ignore the silver lining, I've found deleting the browser history and cookies seems to befuddle the ads. I think it was 1998 when I last went to a porn site. What followed was promptly needing to rebuild my Windows PC. Since then I've learned about sandboxes and other approaches if one wants to visit the 'dark web' or whatever. Not much to see there IMO, but it's good to know it exists and how to avoid it. These days, it's not about crashing the hard drive and causing mayhem but rather to take one's personal information and finding ways to be insidious.

Ad's are one of the insidious approaches: at least that's what the IT tech folks at work keep saying. Google has played and will continue to play a role in that. Eventually, the Federal Government may step in after people understand and complain more about how Google (and Yahoo, Bing, etc.) make their billions. Call me paranoid, but I think my future personal web browsing will be in private mode.

p.s. The internet is a wonderful communication tool, appears to have been designed to efficiently distribute pornography, and is a terrible choice for trying to buy underwear. Surprised

by straybrit 3/25/2018, 1:59 pm

A late suggestion - the Brave browser for Android. Built on Firefox but with extra security.

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