Are there changes underway to ramp up ads for users?

[Renate]

I notice big blank holes in forum headers as if the CSS is changing and room for ads is being inserted.
And I got a footer ad out of the blue.
Is this a sign of things to come?

I never look at MR on my phone because I don't log in there and the ads are far too intrusive.

[Martinoptic]

I dont get ads when logged in but do when not.

[Renate]

Right, but even logged in do you see a big white hole right now between the thread title and the first post?
That didn't use to be there.
(The red is my editorializing.)

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Renate

Right, but even logged in do you see a big white hole right now between the thread title and the first post?
That didn't use to be there.
(The red is my editorializing.)

No big empty space for me.

[Renate]

Maybe I'm lucky and getting A/B'ed.

The big white space is a <div> with a script with "adsbygoogle".

 <div style='text-align:center; height: 90px; margin:2px auto 16px;'>
            <script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

Logged out & in, no difference.

[Sirtel]

I don't get the empty spaces either, but then I do use adblock everywhere, even on my phone.

[Renate]

Well, I added this to my hosts:

0.0.0.0 pagead2.googlesyndication.com

When refreshed I Initially got "Can't connect" in the big white space.
Then I Ctrl-F5'ed and now the big white space is half as big.
But it's still there.
It's 90 pixels even if you kill the script.

There's also this:

The Web Console logging API (console.log, console.info, console.warn, console.error) has been disabled by a script on this page.

Nice guys, eh?

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Renate

Maybe I'm lucky and getting A/B'ed.

The big white space is a <div> with a script with "adsbygoogle".

 <div style='text-align:center; height: 90px; margin:2px auto 16px;'>
            <script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

Logged out & in, no difference.

I'm not getting that div, so maybe indeed A/B testing or some backend glitch.

Originally Posted by Renate

There's also this:

The Web Console logging API (console.log, console.info, console.warn, console.error) has been disabled by a script on this page.

Nice guys, eh?

That's right up there with disabling the back button and copy and paste.

[Martinoptic]

Originally Posted by Renate

Right, but even logged in do you see a big white hole right now between the thread title and the first post?
That didn't use to be there.
(The red is my editorializing.)

No spaces. Using safari.

[PeterT]

Can you try a different browser? Or setup a new profile on your existing browser.

[juliazero]

When logged no spaces even without adblock.

[Renate]

Ok, as I said, this stuff was just waiting to move in.
I'm logged in.
When I remove the ban for that domain I now get three ad sections when I view a forum.
There's a top one where I showed blank space is now an ad.
There's a bottom one and a popup footer one.
These are all currently wacky.
I can refresh and sometimes they are there and sometimes not.

Edit: The current state: without blocking I have a top panel, two side panels and a footer that are filled with ads.
With blocking there are no ads but 90 px of empty space at top.

[DNSB]

For what it may be worth, I tried this with 4 browsers under Windows, 3 browsers under MacOS and 2 browsers under Linux (MacOS and Linux running as VMs). I do not use ad-blockers. While there were minor changes in the appearance of the page, I did not see the ads you are showing when I was logged in. Perhaps some add-on on your system is causing this?

[Renate]

I checked for DNS spoofing. I disabled Javascript.
I used curl to load a page and without cookies it identifies me as guest and has the same ad div.

[DiapDealer]

No wide empty spacing for me (and no ads). Are you sure you're not applying local css (for theming purposes) that's gone wrong?