I've noticed Rosity using alot of new banners lately..anything from the USA-Skincancer society to Smiley central(avoid at all costs)..but none of the new ones seem related at all to 3d. ..Still at least the dancing monkey has gone bye-bye :o)

That'd probably explain why I sometimes don't get a banner of a page - Mozilla and me, we're not allowing 'third party' connections or popups. (Hint, hint, hint) There are situations when IE must be used, but Mozilla and Firefox totally put IE to shame - no popups, no bull-content, no adware instant install, tabbed browsing. Why is anyone still using M$'s crapola?

Ha! I haven't noticed those, but I just reloaded a page to see the new banners, and I can say every one was completely new. Since the advent of the animated banners, I guess I've just totally tuned them out entirely! I actually made my first purchase here after seeing brokered product banner while browsing the forums.... They are just shooting themselves by letting offensive stuff in. I don't enjoy local TV thanks to the low budget, offensive car sales commercials, and NEVER listen to commercial radio due to the highly "energetic" adds that grate on my ears. If you use firefox, you can actually block the whole renderosity banner, and never see them (in any form). It's a practice I feel guilty about doing sometimes, but if they cross a line, that is no longer an issue. eric

we get banners here? where? when? how? and most of all... WHY? ;] I never look at any banner on any site, just completely block that area from my attention.

Smiley central(avoid at all costs) Oh, ugh! I made the mistake of going there and downloading and my computer was immediately filled up with spyware and all kinds of malicious crap. I ended up having to totally format my C: drive and reinstall the operating system, despite having three spyware removal programs on hand. The registry was apparently pretty badly corrupted by that stuff... SO, yes, I agree, AVOID AT ALL COSTS, and it kind of disgusts me that Renderosity will will advertising space to a site that puts spyware on your system. To be fair, it's possible they didn't know, but they ought to by now.... bonni

Use task manager to check that your machine's not running anything that looks like: Bargain Buddy, Bullseye Networks or Windows AdControl. If it is then there's a good chance that those banners are actually iFrames overlaying the real ones. It's a new adware/scumware scam exploiting (surprise, surprise) security holes in IE6.

If you do have any of that stuff there's plenty of advice out there on how to get rid of it, but be warned I spent 12 hours cleaning 3 machines at work! I tried to persuade my boss to send them a bill for my time - doing some whois shows they're all legal entities in the US - maybe if we all got together and sued them for our wasted time they'd think twice about their tactics!

also, don't allow any 3rd party stuff ever. and no clientside scripting or plugins. so no flash no popups no moving menus nothing that is a useless frill really concidering ripping the javascript out of lynx and making a graphic front end for it. text mode only. not even a pic will show then.

Bonni..my sister did the same thing..& for whatever reason(revenge,humour maybe) ..called me into clean it all out..it took hours & I'm still not entirely sure it's all gone..it seems to install an entire suite of spyware & adware. & yes,there is a good chance Rosity dont realise this as the software claims to be spyware free..(a quick google disproves that one though)

stonemason;

if I'm right and it's the same thing that's hit my office network, those banners don't come from Renderosity at all. It's a kind of 'banner hijacking'. The idea came originally from the late, deeply unlamented, Gator/GAIN Corporation I believe.

if I'm right and it's the same thing that's hit my office network, those banners don't come from Renderosity at all. It's a kind of 'banner hijacking'. Perhaps the PTB should be directed to this thread? bonni

Next time you get an unsolicited email from some ever-so-helpful site saying they can help remove spyware if you click their link, just do exactly what they say and install their free spyware remover. Yeah, right. The sad thing is there are a lot of people who will fall for it, though.

Perhaps the PTB should be directed to this thread?

From the point of view of confirming whether or not they've ever taken banner ads from Crucial Technologies, Smiley Central or Dancing Monkies(??). If they haven't though, the problem is clientside and there's not much they can do.

I've never seen a banner here that wasn't for the RMP or Bondware, how come others have?

Thanks elizabyte, You were correct, no I didn't know. But, I do now. I'll put those on hold and will be checking into it first thing in the morning. It was a new service we were trying out. Thanks for the heads-up, Lillian

Spyware! Ugh. My daughter just got connected to the internet with my networking. She had a spyware cookie dropped on her and can't find a way to get rid of it without reformatting. It took over her windows media player and other files too. Looks like I'll have to slowly climb her steps and seek out the guilty little devil and exorcise it. This on is from 2nd-thought.com. Avoid it.

The banner currently on top of this page is for "digital tutors". It is apparently innocuous, since it isn't blinking or bouncing or frothing at the mouth.

I'll put those on hold and will be checking into it first thing in the morning. It was a new service we were trying out. Cool. Thanks for the prompt response! bonni

The banner currently on top of this page is for "digital tutors". It is apparently innocuous, since it isn't blinking or bouncing or frothing at the mouth.

My "Frightful Fareies" banner has me weaving a garlic necklace, and I'd advise you all to do the same. Seriously though, the banner hijacking bit is real as I know to my cost.

Ah, see, no banner and using Firefox! ;) The banner is banner advertisement that appears above the links at the very top of the page.

Simply visiting a site shouldn't install spyware. AFAIK you have to allow the installer to run. There are certainly sites that try to force you to install their stuff, but you can get out of infinite popups as a last resort by killing the browser. However, Renderosity should not have links to such sites, that's for sure.

All I'm seeing is renderosity stuff. I have had warnings from XP pro that avenue A and a few others were attempting do download and I blocked them. Since then they haven't hit again. Marque

Simply visiting a site shouldn't install spyware. AFAIK you have to allow the installer to run. Sites can install malware of various sorts, but the smileys thing is an installation. You go to the download and run it, supposedly to get a collection of smileys, and it sabotages your system. bonni

I have had it attempt to actually download and run. Marque

They should just make spyware illegal.

Ditto mamba-negra. I've bought many things here as a result of the passive banner, but the new popover banner looks like porn-spam, so my webtuned perception ignores it. Bigger is not necessarily more salient. For instance, a bus is harder to see instantly than a car, because the bus seems to trigger "house" perception filters more than "car" filters.

ockham I do the same thing. Many times I've followed a rendo banner to a product because it was well done and caught my eye. Marque

Simply visiting a site shouldn't install spyware.
It will. It's written in the code of the page.
At least with Firefox you get this but in IE it just installs without your knowledge.

On the other hand, blocking banners hurts the merchants here. You see, banner ads are the only way that we merchants can advertise our product: we aren't allowed to mention the Marketplace in the forums, any mention of our own product is frowned upon, and product announcements are restricted to the Product Showcase Forum. So, while I agree that annoying banners (meaning ones that drop cookies and come from off-site companies) should be blocked, take the time to view banners from your fellow merchants. You never know- you may actually see a product that you're interested in! --John

well I would.. if there wasn't one large problem. how much space the banners, menu, poser banner, links and notes of who's who running the poser forum take up. I'm running on 1280x1024. and as you can see in my image above, even without the banners, a full TWO THIRDS of my screen is taken up with that clutter before I even see the topic at hand. anyone running below 1280? you have my deepest sympathy! sorry something hadda go here and it's the banners.

I enjoy the banners...if they don't move. I, too, have purchased items because of banners. (I never click on banner ads...except at Poser sites. :-)

But I find Flash and animated banners so incredibly annoying that I've blocked them. It's easy with Firefox. Just block *.swf and *.gif files coming from Rosity's ad server. Then you get the static banners but not the moving ones.

So if your ad is a JPG, I'll see it. Otherwise, well, there's more real estate on my screen. :-)

I don't know about Firefox, but Mozilla has an option that will only run an animation once. So animated gifs and even Flash will play and stop. Very nice. :)

That's awful. What kind of dance does this Monkey do? Haven't seen that one. Smiley central is bad enough, yes, had my experiences with that as well. Avoid, avoid, avoid. Like a real bad flu or worse and it certainly won't make you smile.

I've been clicking on several banners, checking out the goods there, even adding them to my cart. So the banners work, with the following caveat -- I don't think I've ever clicked on one that was moving. I freeze the animations then scroll down as soon as I can.

well i don't want things adds on renderosity like we need more adware and spy ware!

Yes, I use Anidisable at the DAZ forums. Because I like seeing people's animated avatars...but only once. Some of the animated banners here at Rosity, though, I don't want to see even once. Not going to pick on any in particular, but some of them move so fast it makes me dizzy to look at them.

yup! When a pitch (pun intended) makes me nauseous and motion sick... do you merchants really think I'm going to buy your product? I don't care if it flashes, rolls up and down and up and down and up, or shivers like an aspen facing a madman with a chain saw... if it moves, I actively avoid looking at it. I do click on static, well-presented banner ads.

Simply visiting a site shouldn't install spyware. I can't believe I missed this before... this is UNTRUE. Please don't think you are safe by believing that you can prevent spyware by clicking "no, don't install". Too many companies take advantage of IE's security flaws- an unpatched computer can have spyware and viruses automatically downloaded and installed by the use of "DSO Exploit" code. And other companies may swap out their "safe" banner for an "exploit" banner... and only the non-patched IE-users would be hit. These companies think it's good marketing to bombard a user with spyware to sell their "spyware removal" programs. This is exactly what happened to me- one day while I was reading my Yahoo mail, I was bombarded with viruses and spyware. On the other hand, both Firefox and Opera do NOT have these security flaws- they may have their own flaws, but hackers only seem to be coding hacks for IE. --John

As I said they should just make spyware illegal. No one has to use it so it should be banned.

problem is the same as Spam. yup you can make Spyware illegal in the US and Europe (laws are already being put in place). but what if it comes from for example china? or japan? where no such law exists. the laws you have in your country don't apply to the spammers/spyware merchants there since it's not illegal there. tis a can of worms thats gonna get worse :(

They should persuade places like china and japan etc to make spyware illegal there, too. It would be a good thing and wouldn`t cost the governments of these countries to enact the law so they could do it.

I have been working with Tribal Fusion to get to the bottom of the imbedded cookie issue. This is what I was advised. (Don't shoot me, I'm just passing along the information I was provided.)

Tribal Fusion's privacy policy is simple. To protect the privacy of individual web users, we only allow advertisers to target their ad campaigns based on content. We don't let advertisers target their ad campaigns using real or anonymous user profiles.

However, we do assign an anonymous cookie to each user. This cookie serves only two purposes:

-We track how many times an ad is served to a particular user and we stop serving the ad after a certain number of views.

-We limit the number of times we serve intrusive ads to each user's browser.

Tribal Fusion has high standards when it comes to privacy. We protect user privacy while meeting the needs of advertisers and publishers.

This is what they advised is the deal with the cookies. I just wanted to follow up and let everyone know what the purpose was, and what was going on.

Thanks,
LillianH
Renderosity Marketing & Promotions

"We limit the number of times we serve intrusive ads to each user's browser" What exactly is an 'intrusive ad' ?????? Is Rendo going to continue using this 'service' ? You know, since the ads are served off-site and aren't approved by you, you can never be 100% sure what is actually being served to the Renderosity user base. Just a thought, Rebekah

"What exactly is an 'intrusive ad' ??????" Pop-up window? I just noticed that they tried to open one here, but since I set Opera to accept only asked-for pop-up windows, it never opened. Funnily, I never noticed any non-RMP banner. And yeah, using IE without any modification will enable ActiveX controls embedded in pages. Which is ... a bad thing.

Well, I've just gone the "Firefox with Adblocker" route. I won't be seeing ads here again (banner or front page). I think it's a shame that the legitimate passive service that the banner ads used to provide isn't being honored anymore, but that's Renderosity's call. Shrug.

Renderosity opted out of the pop-ups, pop-unders, and all other type of in-your-face advertising from Tribal Fusion. These were never activated on our site. Perhaps this notification was from blocking one of the Renderosity Merchant's banner ads. Dear lundqvist, you stated: "I think it's a shame that the legitimate passive service that the banner ads used to provide isn't being honored anymore". I am not sure I understand what you are trying to say. We have not done away with any of the merchant banners. That hasn't changed. The reason most banners are not getting viewed is because members are choosing to block them. This was going on prior to us working with Tribal Fusion last month. The Tribal Fusion ads are not currently running, but we still have some people that block the Renderosity Merchant ads because they don't want to see any advertising at all regardless of how "passive" it may be. I think they're missing out on seeing a lot of cool and new items, but it is their call and yours. Thanks, Lillian

"Renderosity opted out of the pop-ups, pop-unders, and all other type of in-your-face advertising from Tribal Fusion. These were never activated on our site." Thanks for the clarification. That was why I was wondering what it was since I hadn't seen any pop-ups and was wondering what else it could've been. --Rebekah--

erm lillan I block them because of space. have you noticed how with the poser forum has 2/3rds of a 1280 screen full of banners, links tables etc before you get to the topic? and thats without the advert banner at the top and the renderosity logo! add those in, and you've got a FULL 1280 screen full before you get to whatever has been posted. If I could find away to block more I'm doing it..

Hmmm...sounds like maybe the Poser forum header needs too loose a few pixels for it's new year's resolution ;-) Thanks for letting me know the logic behind your decision Khai. Very good to know. All the best, Lillian

Now that you mention it, when the forum loads I am already scrolling down out of habit with a running start almost.....

I only block the really annoying banners. Some people have no idea how to use Flash so that it doesn't make you nauseated. ;-) bonni