First of all, I would like to thank the people who emailed me or left me comments alerting me that they were receiving pop-up ads while visiting this blog. I use Firefox which has an excellent built-in pop-up blocker so was completely unaware of the problem. After receiving a few complaints about the pop-up ads, I realized that there may be a problem on my end and not just a reader with malware on their system causing the ads. I turned off all of my pop-up blockers and found that something on my site was referencing a URL called falkag.net which is an advertising site. There was no evidence of my blog being tampered with which led me to believe that one of the scripts I was using for one of the various web services I subscribe to was the cause of it.
The first hit counter I started using when I started blogging was nedstat. I rarely look at it anymore since I prefer Sitemeter to check my referrals, charts and hits but have kept nedstat for historical reasons more than anything else. The last time I checked nedstat, I found that it had been bought by a company called Webstats4u. That was the only new thing really on my blog so I decided to do a technorati search on Webstats4u to see if any other bloggers had anything to say about it. Here are a few samples of what I found.
Patrick Cooper wrote this:
Under the new regime, the script did a little more. Like sticking “Meet New Girls” on top of my page in large text. When the script got back to Webstats4u, it pinged a different script, not just increasng the counter but also running a program, Tom reported. This program handled a 48-hour cookie (mmmm, 48-hour cookie). If you hadn’t hit a Webstats4u-using site in the previous 48 hours, the program hit another couple Javascript files, more programs, at a site called falkag.net. “A prime purveyor of Web advertising, including popups.”
Rob Cottingham has a similar post except he goes through Webstats4U’s license agreement and finds this:
Well, that decides it. I have dumped nedstat, aka Webstats4u and suggest that anybody else who has that as a hit counter to take a good look to see if they are sending pop-up ads through your site. It seems that most of the pop-up ads were porn ads which really pisses me off since I have tried to keep this blog clean for my readers who visit it from work. I apologize for the ads and am sorry I didn’t find out about it sooner.
Here is the Technorati search for Webstats4u. Looks like I am not the only person who is upset.