Hey UMD advertisers. Soundguy alerted me to his ads prematurely running out of ads. After researching the logs, it seems that someone or someTHING has clicked most of everyone's site header ads and forum sidebar ads until they have run out of credits. This attack, if that's what it was, occurred from a single IP address. No other ad location seems to have been affected.

I am crediting all site header and forum sidebar ads with 200 credits right now. And I am programming UMD to prevent anybody from clicking any ad more than a couple of times. If they should click it more than the threshold that I'm setting, the link will still work (they'll still be sent to your site / download), but credits will not be depleted. An admin will be notified to do more research, too.

Thanks,
Messmaster

Geesh. Ya know, I wondered sometime back if something like that could happen.

"I hate so-and-so, and I'm gonna click 'em right off the page!"

Glad you are fixing the problem. Limiting clicks by a single IP is a grand idea.

Some people might not really know that those are pay-per-click (credits represent money). I certainly didn't until I had one myself.

Now that I know that (here is an idea for other nosy people who want to be kind...)

When I'm doing nothing more than being nosy as to what a thing is, I will see if the website is right on the banner anyway and type the URL in myself so that real potential customers are the ones who use the clicks.

Nessie

Nice work! I'd always wondered if that wasn't a risk with the ads, glad to know it's been dealt with.

And yeah, I agree with Nessie, whenever I'm just being curious, I find the site in question by its name or URL rather than clicking on the ad directly.