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Is there a way to prevent ad networks from creating pop-ups in my site. I am using OpenX to manage my ads. I explicitly told the networks not to show any pop-ups. As I have many ad networks I cannot be sure which one is invoking the pop-ups.

niton
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Roy Peleg
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1 Answers1

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I would imagine the ads are being generated by javascript which is run when a webbrowser opens the page.

Thus you can't do any processing or filtering on the server side to determine this, and stop it. Client side scripting to determine this would also be very hard to produce.

To expand on the client side scripting issue, if you really want to solve this problem consistently, you could create a program which mimics a user, this could then trap any popup's which are created, and log them.
You could use this to test results from referring pages, by changing your IP address, or other tests.
It really depends how much time you want to spend on this.
Incidently, your ad providor's might not like this at all, as you are possibly commiting fraud by doing this. (If they pay you for each ad view.)

My advise would be to test your webpage, and determine which ad provider is the problem.

Once you know that you can either remove them, or discuss it with them.

Bravax
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  • Hi, thanks for the response. Yea, the ad networks provide a JS code which basically allows them to do anything they want. I can't really test which advertiser is causing this because the popups appear only to a small amount of users. Could be geo targeted, referrer depended or anything else... – Roy Peleg Mar 29 '09 at 11:14
  • You clearly know they exist. Is it possible to get more information on the scenarios which cause a popup? It might also be worthwhile to log which provider is used, so you can track which provider is causing the issue. – Bravax Mar 29 '09 at 11:35
  • The problem is that I get complaints from users. I can't ask them to participate in my QAs. I was hoping to be able to do something independently. – Roy Peleg Mar 29 '09 at 11:55
  • I can see your point. Is it possible to move the generation of the ads to the server side? I doubt this is possible, but it's worth suggesting. – Bravax Mar 29 '09 at 13:24
  • Any option (depending on the number of providers), is to run different providers on different days, so you can isolate which one is the problem. – Bravax Mar 29 '09 at 14:37
  • I can run ads from my own server. But I'll never have the diversity the networks are allowing, so its not an option. As I can't really recreate the pop-ups I'm only relying on the users to provide feedback and they don't report the pop-ups on a daily basis, running providers separately won't help. – Roy Peleg Mar 29 '09 at 16:00