12-04-2009, 04:48 PM
On Cyber Monday I logged into a favorite vendor's site, and while there, entered their one-day giveaway of 100 orders, up to a max of $500 each, or the equivalent average cash value of the winners that did place orders for winners not placing orders and just entering the contest under the "no purchase required" rule... I entered w/o ordering. Ever since, I've been bombarded in my browser history w/ spam links to banner ads. I think I've finally narrowed it down to another hobbyist forum as the source for the links. The other forum has a "clear cookies" feature which I used, and that logged me out (as expected) and temporarily stopped the barrage of spam links until I went to the log in page whereupon they started up again, validating (I think) the assumption of that forum as a/the source of the spam links, even though I still didn't log back on. The log in page has two banner ads, and it is the one at the bottom that appears to be the culprit. Browsing the forum w/o logging in makes the site background a fixed width and grey, and only have one banner per page. After logging in the site background is blue and dynamically width'ed to fit your browser, and has two banners per page, adding the one at the bottom.
Now getting back to the vendor's site; this whole mess only seems to happen when my browser is in log in mode there; IOW either logged in, or leaving my browser set to automatically log in. The browser doesn't have to have a tab or window open to the vendor's site, it just has to be set in log in mode. If I log off of the vendor's site so that I am not automatically logged back in when reopening their site, the spam link caching in the browser history stops. The vendor's customer service folks could not point me to a "clear cookies" feature for their site, and thus far has been unable to stop the onslaught of spam links triggered by entering their contest. I really don't want to clear everything from my browser, but I would like to stop the spam links from overrunning my browser history w/o worrying about being logged on or off w/ multiple sites.
It's as though entering the contest caused something to happen to cause my browser to look for other sites that use a certain bannering system, and go nuts w/ it upon finding it?! Any insight on how to remedy this situation is much appreciated. Thanks,
Buzz
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Now getting back to the vendor's site; this whole mess only seems to happen when my browser is in log in mode there; IOW either logged in, or leaving my browser set to automatically log in. The browser doesn't have to have a tab or window open to the vendor's site, it just has to be set in log in mode. If I log off of the vendor's site so that I am not automatically logged back in when reopening their site, the spam link caching in the browser history stops. The vendor's customer service folks could not point me to a "clear cookies" feature for their site, and thus far has been unable to stop the onslaught of spam links triggered by entering their contest. I really don't want to clear everything from my browser, but I would like to stop the spam links from overrunning my browser history w/o worrying about being logged on or off w/ multiple sites.
It's as though entering the contest caused something to happen to cause my browser to look for other sites that use a certain bannering system, and go nuts w/ it upon finding it?! Any insight on how to remedy this situation is much appreciated. Thanks,
Buzz
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