redirects

Why do I sometimes click on a link to a post and get redirected to an ad? Its very annoying.

Please go to a post where you find the trouble and report it (click MORE INFO | REPORT below the avatar of the poster) so we can check the links.

Is the link in response to a question and is the content of the link relevant to the question? If the answer is no to both of the above questions, is the post recent or very old?

Acetoolguy wrote in post #17457670
Why do I sometimes click on a link to a post and get redirected to an ad? Its very annoying.

You have something in your browser that redirects, we do not do any redirects to ads here.

A while back I had a malware that got on my machine that redirected links. It took me months to finally get rid of it.

Google malware - redirect

So for example in your response, thanks BTW, the words "your browser" now have a link to mediashift ads. I never had that before the forum changed but your saying its something in IE allowing it to happen?

Yes, that's correct. I don't see any links in Pekka's post. Any link in there is being inserted by something on your computer.
Here's Pekka's post as I quote it. I'm using the "noparse" tags to prevent BBCode from working, so if you still get a link, it's at your end.
[QUOTE=Pekka;17458200]​You have something in your browser that redirects, we do not do any redirects to ads here.[/QUOTE]

Acetoolguy, "your browser" in Pekka's post isn't a link on my screen. I never get redirects. Your computer is contaminated. Those links to ads have nothing to do with POTN or AMASS.

What happened to me (with malware that infected my PC) is that whenever I clicked on a link (in IE) it would send me off to another site.

It's embedded the malware into your browser and until you run an application that can get rid of the malware your browser will never work right.

I've worked in IT for many years and it baffled me for weeks. I could have just formatted my hard drive and reinstalled everything but I'm kind of hard headed and tried to get rid of it myself.

Like I said earlier, do a Google like this to find software to get rid of it.

Edited: Maybe Pekka can confirm or deny this but I think that even a link on this site (like the one I posted in this post to Google) could be redirected by malware to another site. I believe that if your browser is infected, even a clean site like AMASS could be allowing malware to redirect links to other sites.

Thanks everybody for your help. It was something that Google was allowing. I went into their ad choices and realized it was set to allow most anything. it does not look like you can stop their ads altogether but you can tighten them up a lot. The links have since disappeared.
A bit of digging showed you also have to watch for add-ons in your browser. They have names like text enhancement or coupon saver but are basically Adware. They seem to be mostly harmless, just putting ads in your face whether your want them or not. There is also freeware out there that will disable the links from appearing.

Wow thats interesting. Thanks for sharing. So even in IE Google ad choices was causing that?

I know Google Chrome extensions are crazy ...