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[Fixed] Wowhead uploading multiple gigabytes of data since 11/22/16
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Post by
Angelic
ZAM has become increasingly hungry about revenue, and the worst thing is there is nothing you can do about it. There simply isn't a website community tool as advanced and rich as this one, for which I am thankful to the people that made it happen. And I assure you those people aren't the same people that make advertising and monetizing decisions.
I feel bad for having to enable my advertisement blocker on a website that has been part of my life as a gamer for ten years, I feel bad for not being able to provide the minimal contribution as a user that keeps the site alive because I don't know at which point ZAM will serve me another malicious ad.
I hope no one had to suffer much with bills from this issue.
Post by
andalya
uBlock Origin didn't stop it. I've had it since I first switched over to Chrome and I've had massive lag issues still with it on.
Sometimes ads aren't blocked just by turning it on, sometimes you have to add the ads to the block list.
Once uBlock Origin (Adblock Pro) is installed as a Chrome extension, navigate to wowhead, and then look for the ad and right-click it. Choose "Block Element" then click "create" and it creates a filter to block it and the ad should no longer be shown.
Apparently at some point the code behind the ads was changed so Adblock Plus and Adblock no longer are able to block the ads on this site. So when I noticed the ads being displayed, and they were animated and huge (and refreshing the page frequently), I had to find something that actually could block them and found that uBlock Origin could.
I don't understand why there are 5 ads on each page, and why some of them are huge and most of them are animated. The website designer should know that the best ads are the unobtrusive ones that people don't want to block so they can support your site (I am also a web designer).
Also, as others pointed out, the ad source needs to be reputable so people aren't shown inappropriate ads that sometimes won't allow you to report the ad. And it is very concerning that this site is using up so much of peoples' bandwidth.
Everyone loves wowhead, so hopefully you guys can figure out how to fix this issue and put up just a few unobtrusive ads from a reputable source.
Post by
Xella
Not news, but I am also having the same issue. The ads in question appear to be circumventing AdBlock on Chrome on OSX; no matter how many times I manually hide anything on any given Wowhead page, as soon as the page refreshes they're all right back and driving up crazy amounts of data usage.
I really don't like using ad blockers because I've been on the other side of that (the one whose revenue is being blocked), but this is just straight-up unacceptable. Several of the ads that aren't blockable are the super bright, doesn't-mesh-with-the-website, flashy kind that make it hard to use the site because I... well, I can't read the actual website anymore. Some of them are larger than expected and block the "report ad" button anyway so that's not even an option, not even talking about the ones that forward you elsewhere.
Thank goodness my local cable company removed our cap recently, or I would be more than eyesore and annoyed :\
Post by
1727384
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
franto
Was forced to install adblock like 1 month before, because there has been some ads, which has been killing my browser!
Please wowhead admins - if you care about your users - do something about the ads! Also the search - going to google hit, wowhead + search term is like 1000% times faster, than using your search engine!
Post by
Wanderingfox
Adblock won't solve the issue alone, you need either a noscript plugin, or your adblock needs to support a custom filter so that you can specify a script link. Adblock will just block the ads after they have downloaded, but the script itself is still running and generating a ton of network activity.
If you have the latter (uBlock and ABP both have this capability), add this filter:
*.cloudfront.net/mb*.gz.js
This will block the MonkeyBroker script that is doing all the redirects and constantly trying to pull down ads.
Becoming a Patron does stop the MB script from being served, but only once you're logged in.
Which would be great if wowhead would stay logged in... I've been constantly getting logged out every few hours for the last month or two (despite cache clears etc) and they've done nothing to fix it.
There's so many things on this site that are just outright broken these days (missing quests, loot drop filters that don't work, etc.)... wowdb is starting to look pretty good.
Post by
Kamero
From redirects to massive data hogging, this site has really deteriorated from THE top fan site to a user-beware back-alley.
Lamenting the wowhead of old.
:(
Post by
MagusMaximus
I currently use Fair AdBlocker App by STANDS and currently do not experience any ads whatsoever when I browse WoWHead. For reference, I browse using Google Chrome on Win10 OS.
Post by
1727384
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Erorus
We've determined that a combination of our ad provider plus our primary CDN provider may be causing the upload bandwidth issue.
We've just now pointed Wowhead at a backup CDN which should alleviate the issue.
We continue to perform more tests to determine the exact cause.
While personally I am sympathetic to the other issues facing our users (ad quality in general, login cookie issues, etc), this thread is not the best place to discuss them. Please keep this thread on the topic of upload bandwidth usage, so we can nail this one once and for all.
Please do continue to report here any irregular upload bandwidth usage you observe while visiting Wowhead. Since this is ad-network related, I would ask you please to include your browser and which ad blocker browser extensions you run (if any) in your reports. They really do help us to establish a pattern of what may be causing the errors and help us to fix the problem. Thank you.
Post by
KodiackOfThrall
I'm not seeing any major uploading happening right now, but there are still numerous issues with the advertisements in general. Opening the Wowhead front page alone without any sort of ad blocking requires downloading several megabytes and the auto-refreshing ads result in spikes in data usage. A couple thousand requests were made from sitting on the page for only a few minutes, and every time the ads refresh I see more than two full cores utilised on my
4.2 GHz Core i7-6800K.
This is going to be beyond killer on systems with only dual-core CPUs, or on systems with several Wowhead tabs opened.
Also, I had some ad refresh in and play the Xbox sound. It made me jump, just like it made my CPU and network usage jump.
While uploading may be fixed, Wowhead still exhibits a lot of unsavoury behaviour with regards to ads. Hoping to see this get resolved relatively soon.
Cheers,
Kodiack
Post by
nik666
How low have we fallen, to call intrusive spam providers "legitimate".
Post by
Sckhar
I bet that's their way of making people pay to not have ads :P
Some sites have been known to go as low as making the life of free users miserable so they end up paying.
Post by
718998
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Breet
I've been having this issue for weeks. I also turned on ad blocking for wowhead and yet, that still made no difference. (and it was unloading data to some Australian company for me, being Aussie) Fairly much couldn't do anything if you wanted to check wowhead since it would just suckup everything, even made wow unplayable if you tried to tabout and check something on wowhead).
Last day or 2 tho I haven't noticed it uploading. Time to unblock again and see if it happens again.
Post by
Hexatomon
Ads on wowhead are STILL refreshing like mad.
Why IS that?
I'm not more likely to click on an ad just because a batch of five new ones load in every god damned minute.
Everyone's been telling you for weeks now, STOP refreshing the ads constantly and consuming such ludicrous amounts of data and processing power for people.
Offer relevant, quality ads instead of quantity. Annoy people, and they'll just punish you. That's how human beings work.
Post by
Sas148
The ad refresh rate and the issue reported originally in this thread are different issues. The refresh rate is still something we're looking to tweek as well as other changes that are "in progress" and have been since last week. We're continuing to see what adjustments can be made to improve the experience on the site for our community. For now though, since I know this original issue has been resolved, I'll lock this thread to avoid confusion. Thank you.
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