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Three of us have all tried going onto the forums at SQ; all of us have had Virus Protection go crazy and our IE's froze.

Be careful... I don't know what's going on there, but doesn't seem like anything good.

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From:

tunxeh.livejournal.com

SQ's forums have been crashing Safari sporadically for months now. No idea whether it's related.

From:

stubefied-by-gd.livejournal.com

Different from that -- I've had the crashes on my Mac, but now I'm getting attempts to download stuff on a PC, which I never got before. .wmf flie -- is that like a sound file for an ad? It was also trying to go to a counter site.

From:

nasnoona.livejournal.com

It was very strange - I could get onto the home page all right, but when I clicked on a link to the forums, according to the grey bar at the bottom of the screen Explorer seemed to be trying to open a different link altogether, one that looked like gibberish...

From:

author-by-night.livejournal.com

Eek.

From:

tunxeh.livejournal.com

After seeing this, I took a look at the forums and found a message from Zsenya that SQ has started taking Google ads. My suspicion is that one of the ads is your culprit. Since you probably are wary of going to the forums to see the message, here it is:

y'all may have noticed some Google ads popping up on our forums this morning. As much as I hate to do it, this is an experiment to see if we can't get our server costs down a little bit.

There are a number of ways to support the Sugar Quill's operating costs, which are $200/month in order to handle the large amount of data transfer involved in hosting so many forums and such a large story archive. If you are a regular supporter of the Sugar Quill - THANK YOU! It is through kind donations that we are able to keep running and we really appreciate it.

You can read about the different ways on our Support page. Every little bit helps. Our hope is that those Google ads will help reduce this $200 amount.

But please note that the Sugar Quilld does not officially endorse the companies/organizations that appear on the ads.

Thank you for understanding.

Enjoy the site!
Zsenya

From:

author-by-night.livejournal.com

Yeah, but I've been to plenty of sites with google ads, and they don't cause this...

I'm not blaming Zsenya, I just worry someone put a virus on her site. But you could be right.

From:

barbara-the-w.livejournal.com

There's an http//:z.... site that tries to come up. I think that's the culprit. It's loading before the SQ site.

Probably a backdoor virus coming in through an ad link.

From:

tunxeh.livejournal.com

I've been to plenty of sites with google ads, and they don't cause this.

Maybe those other sites have stricter policies about what formats of ads they allow?

From:

annie-jaye.livejournal.com

i'm having the same problem. When I get into the forums a thing pops up asking me to "save or open" a file. At the same time another window that says "running scripts" appears and it just shows gibberish. I can see the forums behind it, but I can't click on anything because by that time my internet is frozen...

From:

victorialupin.livejournal.com

It's happening to me, too. Norton popped-up and said it detected and automatically removed a trojan virus from my computer.

Everytime I go to the forums, I also get the "save or open file," like

annie_jaye.

From:

stubefied-by-gd.livejournal.com

Some kind of .wmf file keeps trying to download on me, and I tell it to cancel opening and I'm fine. I suspect it's a sound attached to one of the new ads or something.