• Our booking engine at tickets.railforums.co.uk (powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!

Forums Problem

Status
Not open for further replies.
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R

RailUK Forums

DarloRich

Veteran Member
Joined
12 Oct 2010
Messages
29,182
Location
Fenny Stratford
My warnings have gone now. Service restored.


EDIT - No it isn't! Warnings back on Chrome. Working very slowly on Internet Explorer
 
Last edited:

SpacePhoenix

Established Member
Joined
18 Mar 2014
Messages
5,492
Still getting the warnings here. It's a bit of a PITA as the bookmark I use is the new posts page and after clicking on ignore warning it triggers the forum search flood control
 

SpacePhoenix

Established Member
Joined
18 Mar 2014
Messages
5,492
No longer get the warning on either chrome or Firefox so fingers crossed, looks like the problem is fixed
 

krus_aragon

Established Member
Joined
10 Jun 2009
Messages
6,042
Location
North Wales
As the earlier posts by forum admins have been overlooked by some more recent posters, let me summarise the whole situation:

Google, while trawling the web gathering data, monitor sites for suspect activity, such as phishing attempts. They label risky websites in Google search results, and have a (default) option for their Chrome browser to “phone home” and check the list of naughty sites before loading the web page.

Other web browsers (e.g. Firefox) and some antivirus software may pay Google for a (regularly updated) copy of the list, to check sites before loading them.

In this instance, according to Forum Staff, RailUK forums was flagged up as suspect because of a malicious advert. Ironically, these adverts are a service provided by another department of Google.

Forum staff informed Google of the issue, and requested a reassessment. Several forum members also reported a “false positive”. We're told that Google have reassessed the site, found no evil adverts, and given our forum a clean bill of health.

Other companies that get attack site info from Google may still be using an older copy of the list. When they get their next update, the false alerts their users are getting will stop.

Of course, if Google Ads' quality control let a malicious ad on to our site again, it would be detected by Google Search's web crawler, and the whole dance starts once more.
 

STEVIEBOY1

Established Member
Joined
31 Jul 2010
Messages
4,003
I had this problem yesterday and this morning, however just logged on around 1415 hrs Monday afternoon and it seems ok, for the time being, just as well as I want to find out about this Friday's Meal and do some posting.
 

dgl

Established Member
Joined
5 Oct 2014
Messages
2,392
Still seems to not be working on tapatalk on WP8.1/Lumia 625
 

87 027

Member
Joined
1 Sep 2010
Messages
699
Location
London
Tapatalk not working for me either - Windows 10 Mobile/Lumia 950. Edit: ditto Android, still getting same error as in post #69
 
Last edited:

Peter Mugridge

Veteran Member
Joined
8 Apr 2010
Messages
14,754
Location
Epsom
I've had an unasked for file download from here as well, 518 bytes, BitDefender scanned it as no problem.

I just now again had an uncommanded download start while on this site; it seems to come from some outfit called bidswitch. I cancelled it again, but was able to copy and paste the full name of it - it's currently being examined and I will report back when I am told what it is and where it is likely to be coming from.




Krus_aragon said:
Of course, if Google Ads' quality control let a malicious ad on to our site again

Over the past two years or so we have had a number of threads on here relating to performance difficulties which all traced back to being advert related.

At the moment I am not able to use my main computer because of an issue caused by an advert on an otherwise perfectly safe site ( possibly not this one but we cannot be 100% sure ). That's putting it mildly actually; it was a 256 bit ransomware attack and this weekend is likely to be the earliest I can get any form of restoration done. No I haven't paid up and I am not going to.

I was going to replace the computer soon anyway so I've simply brought that forwards a few months and will use those files I did have backed up to get going again. The rest I am told it will be several weeks before a solution is available, and then only because someone else did pay up and enough of the key has been recovered from that to allow the time required to be reduced from 14 billion years to a more palatable "several weeks". So for several weeks if not longer I am going to have to keep the old machine cluttering the place up until such time as the rest of the files can be restored.

The point is, a consistent theme across all of this is adverts.

So, when I get my new machine - which is being custom built right now - well, apologies to the forum staff but one of the security features I am going to have on it is adblock. I know you don't like that, and I know why, but at the end of the day it is my computer and nobody else's and after so many issues relating to adverts... I have quite frankly had enough of them.
 

JoeGJ1984

Member
Joined
7 Nov 2010
Messages
521
I'm still getting an alert from Avast. This means that no scroll bar appears and I have to click the middle mouse button to scroll the page (the wheel doesn't work either).
 

miami

Established Member
Joined
3 Oct 2015
Messages
3,164
Location
UK
The point is, a consistent theme across all of this is adverts.

Web browsers apparently are insecure enough to allow drive-by downloads. Website owners who use advert networks like google are allowed google to run whatever code they want on. Google are apparently broke they can't solve this.

The irony is this causes more and more people to use adblockers and noscript, reducing google's main revenue stream.

[oldman]It never happened on usenet[/oldman]
 

Busaholic

Veteran Member
Joined
7 Jun 2014
Messages
14,029

On their uppers, down to their last 100 billion - trouble is, they can't remember which sofa it's tucked down the back of.<(

Above was meant in reply to Google comment above, but it mysteriously disappeared.
 
Last edited:

Metroman62

Member
Joined
4 Feb 2011
Messages
140
Location
Amersham
One assumes it is a forum issue with Tapatalk not working as other forums work OK on it. Have not been able to log into the forum on Tapatalk for two days now.
 

Haydn1971

Established Member
Joined
11 Dec 2012
Messages
2,099
Location
Sheffield
Any news on Tapatalk - works everywhere but here, do you guys need any information on what error messages people are getting ?
 

Peter Mugridge

Veteran Member
Joined
8 Apr 2010
Messages
14,754
Location
Epsom
I just now again had an uncommanded download start while on this site; it seems to come from some outfit called bidswitch. I cancelled it again, but was able to copy and paste the full name of it - it's currently being examined and I will report back when I am told what it is and where it is likely to be coming from.

Well, it's been examined and the result is it seems to have been downloading but not running; it is advert related and it is highly undesirable that it should be downloading itself.

So more re-inforcement of the need for Adblock on my new computer...
 

Mike395

Forum Staff
Staff Member
Administrator
Joined
23 May 2009
Messages
2,894
Location
Bedford
We're aware of the issues with Tapatalk - it's linked with the Google Ads issue which we've resolved recently.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Top