Can't Browse PUP on Saturdays Anymore??

This is Rob and I handle the advertising here and tech here. Sorry you are seeing these issues. I am seeing them too and its been pretty much all I have been working on to fix. The problem is with the third party advertisers. Third party advertisers make this site free to use. They pay the bills. Their self service platforms allow malicious advertisers to get through. The solution is to block the ones that are providing these "forced redirects" or "malvertising" is what they are called. However, the unfortunate thing is finding and blocking the provider is not as simple as it should be. We have actually been dealing with these ads for years. Sort of a thankless task. When we are doing a good job, you don't see these issues. And, although I have heard the comment "its only on this website," a half billion websites today are dealing with this issue. The biggest trend in hacking is to hack third party advertising platforms. I'll spare you, but I can share links where other users of other websites that I am not affiliated with will say the same thing. If you google up ingmatic, brickages and promotefine, you will find a lot of results.

We did a better job blocking them in the past because it was simple...you worked with the ad networks that were devoid of these issues and you didn't work with the ones that weren't...good to go. Well presently, they are all not devoid of these issues. And they don't care enough. So I have to find and block and find and block, flip stuff on and flip stuff off, etc. We are hiring a service that blocks in real time.

Other comments I have heard is, why are some sites not showing these issues to me? Well one answer is if you visited them as frequent as this site eventually you would. I visited a major league baseball site just last week and got the same redirect ads. And of course, as you can imagine, they have a bit more resources than I do to solve this problem and still haven't figured it out. And another reason is some sites only have direct advertisers. Very, very few sites supported by ads have only direct advertisers. But those that do, can avoid. We wish we could be in that boat, but its just not possible. And then there is of course sites that have no advertisers. In the future, we will be offering a purely ad free version that you can pay to use. But, we are not giving up on the free version, supported by ads, being clean of these issues. Truly its our preference that you not have to resort to an ad free paid version, because we actually generate more revenue from a free "supported by ads" version. But its our responsibility that this version not cause these issues.

If it is any indicator for you that I am here on a weekend sharing this information with you, I can assure you that I am doing everything I can and am as frustrated as you are.

Just today we can made some changes. Moving forward (like from the point you read this post on). Can you please let me know if you are seeing an improvement. As we flip switches and block networks, it helps us to figure out what is working.

Thanks again for your help and support of PopUpPortal