Crazy advertisement

[MosheFeingold]

Not sure this is the place for this, but how are ads chosen for DU? Or for any website, for that matter?

I ask this, because every time I get on the page, there is an ad for the NRA, USA Concealed Carry, or something equally not Democrat.

I cleared cookies in case it was some random page I went to that resulted in those ads, but no luck.

I do live in a rural area so it might be based on IP Address.

Note, this is not a "whine," as I assume there is nothing to be done about it, more of a "how does this happen" question.

[Wait Wut]

1. For future reference, you should post questions like this here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1259

In fact, this particular question has been asked several times before. It has to do with the ad software that DU uses. If we talk about nothing but chocolate, we'll get ads about chocolate. But, unfortunately, we talk about the NRA, etc. so those are the ads we get. Admin can, I guess, request that some ads not show or block them if they are offensive, but they don't do that very often. Let the RWNJs waste their money advertising on DU.

I forgot to mention, if you don't want to see any ads, become a member. You can donate what ever you'd like and then you get that pretty little gold star.

[lunatica]

2. My experience with ads on DU is

Many of them are from pages I google, but many of them are also an attempt to match what the OP is about. If you open a thread that has gun language in it you'll get ads about guns, etc.

"They" definitely exist. And "they" are watching us.

[Callmecrazy]

3. Use the Firefox browser with Adblock Plus...

No ads at all. On any website. I love it.

[DavidG_WI]

4. Ad companies track you

in dozens of ways, via social media cookies, HTML5 cookies, flash cookies, silverlight cookies, browser fingerprinting etc. With dozens of ad companies doing so and them contracting with the various megasites they are tracking you everywhere you go online.

The best thing you can do is read up on ad blocking, your browsing experience will improve dramatically, with what will seem like a 3-5x increase in internet speed, but it's just that your browser wont be wasting bandwidth, CPU cycles and time waiting on the tracking servers to respond to them.

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Don't forget the long term "hidden" trackers .

Firefox has a lovely add on called "better privacy" that erases the sneaky trackers.

[DavidG_WI]

6. I covered that with

HTML5 trackers and browser fingerprinting. I should have posted this though https://panopticlick.eff.org/ it's a tool from the EFF to show you what your browser tells every single site you visit about you.

[DavidG_WI]

7. Also,

these are what I'm currently using for privacy and usability. It also helps to uninstall Flash, Silverlight , Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc anything any only use those services in Firefox's private browsing mode if at all.

[MosheFeingold]

8. How do you get that add on?

Forgive me, I am an old guy, and pretty happy to manage to turn the computer on.

[dixiegrrrrl]

10. Sorry to reply so late... here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/?src=search

You gotta have a recent version of Firefox.

[MosheFeingold]

11. Thank you very much

That was very helpful!

[Feral Child]

9. Look at it this way:

They pay so we can play.