Forum Add Ons

[pittstop]

Hi,

One for ADMIN.

A bit confused re the origins of "SIMILAR TOPICS" which appear at the bottom of the page when reading a thread.

Clicked on one recently & my PC's virus guard warned me to go no further.

Today two topics related to which F1 driver would be signing for Ferrari on 2013!!!!!!!!!!!!

How are these generated?

I'm mystified!

[Barbs]

Ouch. I think, but not sure that comes from Forumotion they host the site. As Admin I have no control over that area. I guess as this is a free forum it is in some way how they make the money to host it. The person that will know the answer would be @MKStevo. Hopefully, Steve you you might know.... Please. X (Mark set up the original Forum) @SheStevo just in case Mark didn’t get a request for help x

[Mkstevo]

Hmmm...
I have an adblocker running, so I'm not seeing these suggestions at all. So my first suggestion is to try an adblocker, or a browser that has a built in adblocker (Safari for the Mac).

I've just turned off Ghostery (my adblocker) and I'm now seeing adverts, but no suggestions?

Ah! now I see them! Just above the "Quick reply" box there is a headline "Similar topics". To the left of this there is a "-" sign. Click on the minus sign and the similar topics fold up. The minus turns into a plus "+" which when clicked shows them again. I must have had them turned off. Easy when you know how!

I had it in mind that when I set the original forum up, there was an option to disable certain features. Some of these were indeed paid options, or at least required a number of "Forum Points" that were earned in a way that I could never fully understand due to the differences in language between me and the owners of ForumMotion (who host the site).

The suggestions are (were) pulled from other Forum posts, on Forums also hosted by ForumMotion and always were rather random in nature. The search algorithm never seemed to return logical results and it looks like nothing has changed. 

My Internet Provider was regularly blacklisting ForumMotion making me unable to access it for days. As many of the Forums seemed to be unmoderated some of those in the "darker" corners could be found to be in breach of UK law requiring the IP addresses to be blocked until they were removed. Some also hosted software that might circumvent licensing or indeed carry malware. It might be that this is why your virus guard flagged them up?

So. In summary:
Try an adblocker (Ghostery) or a browser that supports adblocking directly, Opera for the PC or Android or Safari for the Mac, hide the similar topics by clicking the minus "-".

[Barbs]

Always was and still is one of my hero's, thanks Mark.

[pittstop]

Mkstevo,

Thanks for most interesting background info on how these work.

I'll settle for just hiding them for now.

I'm running a Desktop with Windows 10 & when I previously tried an Ad Blocker

 it caused problems on some sites who didn't want their ads blocked!!!

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