Nasty WoWhead?

[Divinexve]

I once went on wowhead and disabled my addblock and a porn ad popped up.

[aeuhe4yxzhds]

Time to jump ship. Its been so useless since after mop. A lot of information is just not there any more, like where herbs spawn

[zeropeorth]

WowDB (which is also owned by curse aka the owners of mmochamp now) has a lot of the same features as wowhead.
just lacks the community to post comments on things like quests that wowhead has

This would be the best time to encourage people to switch over to this database; all it really needs is the comments section to flourish and maybe visual skin options as a luxury addition to be about on par with wowhead. Do they 'own' user comments on their site? If not maybe can get a migration of the better comments from there like the wowpedia/wowwiki thing happened. If not, people could volunteer their time to copy in their own words or just answer as much in they have knowledge of to build the value and usability of this database.

[Deleted]

In my opinion it's the circle of life.

Why did we all get AdBlock? Some people because they hate all advertisements, personally for me it was just for the obnoxious ones (I allow 'non intrusive adverts') auto playing videos etc.

However, this has made advert delivery networks get even more virulent.

Making the use of AdBlock more necessary, the circle continues.

[IKT]

Then she shouldn't open her trap and say things like "If people cared half as much about bad politicians as they do about bad internet advertisements, we'd be in a lot better shape." and "I am not employed by Wowhead. They can't fire me. lol... Also, pointing out that the nation is more important than ads is not offensive...." and then she wouldn't get this shitstorm of people attacking her.

Christ some of you guys are precious.

[jsrfuture]

noscript + cookie whitelisting. It's the most effective way of blocking just about everything. Sure it take some time for new user to get used to that and how to deal with it but i'd say it's worth it.

[Kyanion]

Christ some of you guys are precious.

Care to elaborate or is that too much to ask?

[Brubear]

update 3 hours ago

https://www.reddit.com/user/perculia_wow

perculia_wow 8 points 3 hours ago
Hey checking in again - as an update since my last post, our tech team has been working with our ad provider to shut down the annoying ad networks that increased in severity around Black Friday. We're still monitoring those now, and earlier in the week we did implement some measures against bad ads, which after examination, were not responsible for the upload issues.
We're still analyzing why the upload issues persist - we've had intermittent issues for a week (which increased in severity around Black Friday) that the staff unfortunately can't replicate. We're trying to sense a pattern, and the reports so far haven't been consistent (we still appreciate the reports we have received) so if people could let us know if they're using Chrome on Desktop that would help us a lot. I'll try posting again if/when I know more about the upload issue.

- - - Updated - - -

Also to retierate something earlier in the thread, add this filter

"If you use adblock pro, add this filter manually:
*.cloudfront.net/mb*.gz.js
This blocks MonkeyBroker, which pulls down a bunch of javascript that keeps placing the streaming ads"

Still better off avoiding the site atm though

Based off of what the fix is, sounds like more people need to use NoScript. I use NoScript and AdBlock, haven't had a single add on Wowhead or any lag/latency/bandwidth/crashing issues.

Yes, NoScript is a pain to set up initially, but I really don't see how people feel safe browsing without it.

- - - Updated - - -

noscript + cookie whitelisting. It's the most effective way of blocking just about everything. Sure it take some time for new user to get used to that and how to deal with it but i'd say it's worth it.

Seriously. NoScript saves you a ton of headache in the long run.

[Vargur]

To all of you getting adds on wowhead, you must be using some really wonky add blocker filters. I am using Adblock plus and Ublock origin. Thats all. I havent had a ad in any page in more or less forever. Not a single on on wowhead and i just went trough several pages looking for one.

On apb im using
Adblock Warnig removal list.
Easylist
Fanboy's social blocking list
Easyprivacy
Easylist
Fanboy's Annoyance list.

Ublock origin is standard settings i think.

I have no issues on wowhead.
I do however on Diablofans and mmo-champ. From time to time its deadly slow and slow down my entire computer it seems. Atleast the browser.

For me it's WoWDB that freezes the browser for a good while. That and the white commentless background is why I hate it.

- - - Updated - - -

I once went on wowhead and disabled my addblock and a porn ad popped up.

I think it's based on your recent searches.

[Ilfayt]

I think it's based on your recent searches.

Then shouldn't we all be getting porn ads?

I kid, I kid. Though half the time I do get relevant stuff, the other half, I get weird things off the wall and completely unrelated to anything I'm even remotely interested in.

[Tharkkun]

Wowhead has been infested with bad ads for years, you think they would do something about it when they are supported by Blizzard, but maybe they don't care at all...

It's not necessarily WoWhead. It's the ZAM network injecting their bullshit into their website. ZAM has always been bad but lately it's horrible.
@everyone else. Disable flash BTW and your wowhead won't crash nonstop.

[ShiyoKozuki]

It's not necessarily WoWhead. It's the ZAM network injecting their bullshit into their website. ZAM has always been bad but lately it's horrible.
@everyone else. Disable flash BTW and your wowhead won't crash nonstop.

People still have flash installed on their computers in 2016?

That's not smart.

[shadycharacter1]

after that tweet, blizzard should simply send them a cease and desist and shut the whole thing down

[Deleted]

Amateur hour at Wowhead - again.

This turns up every now and then (rather regularly) - they buy their ads from godforsaken ad-network, which doesn't have any check on what they accept and *blam* your pages is suddenly dropping exploit kits on peoples computers.

They've done this beforeand it seems learned nothing at all. I can't understand why Blizzard keeps endorsing them.
On top of that they've crammed the site full of crap features - so it has gone from a fast, simple search engine (which was its major draw) into a huge feature creep - slow and heavy to load.

Wowhead should be considered harmful and Google and other browser makers should block it was malware site.

[Maia Moon]

Then shouldn't we all be getting porn ads?

I kid, I kid. Though half the time I do get relevant stuff, the other half, I get weird things off the wall and completely unrelated to anything I'm even remotely interested in.

Usually I get relevant stuff in adds, but in wowhead the adds are always german gibberish or something, in language that I don't understand

[Kokolums]

Here's what I did:

1. Open AdBlockPlus
2. Select Options
3. Select the "Add your own filters" tab
4. Copy paste the string mentioned earlier in the thread: *.cloudfront.net/mb*.gz.js

That fixed Wowhead.

Example of options menu I was on where I pasted the script:

[MrExcelion]

Update:

http://www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=257964&p=4014106

"Hey everyone,

Over the course of the day, we've been addressing community feedback about several ad-related issues on the site that were brought up on Battle.net, Reddit, etc. I wanted to post my latest reply here since there's been a lot of posts and I don't want things to get lost.

We've narrowed the upload issue down to several likely targets and disabled what we think is the top cause. The site devs will be continuing to test issues to confirm if they found the fix or not. Their thread with more details is here: //www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=257920.2&p=4014096#p4014096

The whole content team feels really awful about how this played out because we really care about bringing quality data and content to the site and had set up a cool array of holiday content so we could have a few days off and enjoy traveling around.

Ads really suck and unfortunately this weekend we tried to implement a way to make them less intrusive since we knew Black Friday would bring heavier ads and we'd be out eating turkey with our families. This ended up with them loading more, because bad ads were shelved after they loaded, and this had unforeseen data requirements that we didn't anticipate.

Outside of Black Friday, Ad networks now aren't really regulated and they feel like they can get away with whatever since sites need them for profits. It sucks. It's partially why we lowered Wowhead Premium prices to $1 recently - in spite of having a full-time AdOps staff member communicate with the ad networks on nasty ads that should be removed, we were getting a number of complaints still and we wanted a more affordable option. We've gone through several providers in the past few years, after different ones were slow to address complaints on BlizzCon and Christmas.

At this point, we do need ads for the site to survive since we have a lot of unique and complicated features, like the flying tool and dressing room. We also try to design things with the users first in mind; for example, our localized databases aren't very profitable since they can't be monetized well with English ads, but they offer a huge service to a large part of our EU community and fansites, so we'll take the server costs and extra data processing time to keep that maintained.

One thing we want to try to do is reduce the number of ads; we made a layout change to another ZAM site, Lolking, and the site now loads faster than Wowhead after being consistently slower for years. This layout change was scheduled to happen on Wowhead in a few months, after certain ad campaigns finished, but we've bumped up the timing on it. We think in addition to the bug we're trying to track down, there's too many ads on the current layout and it amplifies things. Another thing we want to look at is changing how ads are set up on pages people spend hours on, like the artifact guide - this can chew through hundreds of potential ads and eventually leave you with unsavory ones that make scary noises during a fight

Finally, we've seen some people bring up the idea of a Wowhead-equivalent for Reddit gold for useful comments or guides; it's been cool to read about because part of our Premium revamp was rebuilding the system to be more modern, so there were fewer limitations and we could eventually do cool things like that. With the interest in that, it's something I'd want to prioritize creating.

Thanks for being patient with us - we know that people that are upset are coming from a place of concern and that they do really want to use the site. I have to catch a flight early tomorrow morning so I'm not sure how much more I can check in but my coworker Sas/Stephen is going to be monitoring the threads throughout the evening and see if the technical change we made has improved the upload situation.

Thanks again for bearing with me while I'm traveling back from the East Coast. TL;DR we've narrowed down the issue and are working on a fix, we've disabled the ads that caused the extra data for now."

[Deleted]

At this point, we do need ads for the site to survive since we have a lot of unique and complicated features

Yeah .. so Wowhead, how just about making lean, mean, simple and fast engine to search data?
That'd be nice. Thanks.

[Hawg]

I'm glad it sounds like they are fixing it.

To be honest, I'm not sure I would still play the game without wowhead. The real problem is not wowohead, it's Blizzard. Blizzard has (unfairly imho) dumped a lot of their work in quest design to wowhead. Rather than take the time to write meaningful quest descriptions that have enough detail to actually complete the quest, in many cases Blizzard just list the objectives. Without wowhead and the tomtom addon, many quests would be extremely frustrating to complete.

It's gotten so bad, that leveling without wowhead is basically torture.

[Deleted]