Folding Forum

I may have missed the memo, but this morning, May 5 2013, I noticed that the forum is now peppered with the double-underlined "hover ads". I'm using IE 10 on a Win7 platform. I'm not seeing them on my XP machine with Chrome, or my XP machine with IE8, or on my Win7 running Chrome.

Maybe it's a Micosoft IE10 thing???

I noticed it in a couple of posts this morning - some of the key words in the post have these double-underlined ads in them.

A spot check this morning shows these in every forum page I looked at. Sometimes they appear right away, sometimes after 10 or 15 seconds. I see them on keywords like Microsoft, or Nvidia, or "diabetes treatment" or even "continue".

Even the forum header itself has the ads - I'm seeing one right now in the header for F@h Servers.

And, in the "post a new topic" edit window, I see one on "Disable smilies", and one on "option".

I hope that this is generating some revenue for the board!!

Anyone know if something deliberate happened?

Wow. I'm not sure what's going on there. I'm not seeing that in Chrome.

IE is likely the culprit, which seems to be a recurring theme. http://www.google.com/chrome/‎ will solve all of your problems.

I just now checked in IE10 and I didn't see anything on Windows 8 64-bit. However, by chance, did something download on your system?

Might be one of those useful IE toolbars/plugins/features.

It sounds very much like certain types of adware/malware I've seen. First I'd check to make sure there aren't any extensions installed in IE that you didn't know about, and then I'd run a scan with microsoft security essentials or whatever other anti-virus/malware tool you have at your disposal. If that doesn't work, try to look at the list of installed programs for anything that seems a bit fishy.

Also not in FireFox on either Win7 or Linux. You've got a virus-like IE helper app.

It really sounds like malware.

Yeah - I found some unwanted add-ons that I just deleted in Windows 7 "Programs and Features" control panel. Seems to be back to normal now with none of the "hover ads". The system has been up and stable for over two years now, without issues like this. I've been using (successfully up to now) the Microsoft Security Essentials as a relatively lightweight security solution (vs the Norton suite that I run on all my other computers).

Well, back to more productive endeavors.