Pete: that French internet dating service (Attractive World) is appearing as an ad when I access this site. Is that just on my computer, do you think?

Phil

I haven't seen it Phil, Kavey or Pate will be able to say more on the subject.

Hi Phil

We don't deal with advertisers directly but use an ad service, which are meant to place adverts appropriate to the site content.

Will keep eyes out and if we can spot it and get more info, we can see if it's one we can request not to be included.

x

Thanks, Mamta. I've now got 'Asian Women Looking for Love' popping up. All this rubbish also shows up on the Creme de Languedoc site.

Maybe I'm over-reacting. I've nothing against internet dating, but I don't want to have anything to do with it. Even if I were single, I wouldn't do it.

Phil

Phil, are these pop ups or actually within Mamta's Kitchen?

We don't have any pop up advertising whatsoever, so if they're pop up, I'd think it's something at your end that's generating them.

If embedded, wonder if you could take a screenshot and email the picture to webmaster@mamtaskitchen.com?

Oh dear: pop-ups vs embedded. Not sure what 'embedded' means, but I think these are pop-ups.

Sorry: useless with technology.

Phil

popups are like smaller extra pages that leap out over the top of the page and get in the way. Embeded are built into the page with the rest of the page/text/photos etc working around and with it.

IF these are popups, sounds like you have malware on your computer. Try downloading and running something like Malwarebytes.org and see if it finds anything

Steve

Main advert I get on Mamta's Kitchen is from Tesco Kitchens.

I hope they are not entering into pointless competition with Mamta's Kitchen. I will always follow one of Mamta's recipes rather than a Tesco ready meal (except perhaps in an absolute emergency.)

Winton

Yeah, as others have said we don't have any pop-up ads on the site (mainly because I hate them) so it's most likely to be something at your end.

It's distantly possible that someone has snuck something very clever past Google (who provide our ads) I suppose, but as Kavey says if you can send us a screenshot I can double check and let them know if that's the case.

I'm not a huge fan of adverts generally, but when you're serving a few million pages a year you have to pay for it all somehow ;)

Pete

Thanks, folks.

OK: these are pop-ups. they're showing up on other sites, so it's not Mamta's Kitchen per se.

My Yahoo account has also been hijacked: I've just changed the password.

One of our pcs is decidedly ill, so I'll be taking it off to the workshop tomorrow. I'l ask about that software you mentioned, Steve.

Cheers

Phil

Yes, have just got a spam email from you so was about to come and let you know it looks like there's something wrong at your end.

Hope you can resolve it soon, Phil.

x

Now I've got a dating site ad on Mamta's kitchen as well, mine seems to be a UK based one. It doesn't look like a pop-up though as it's on the top banner. :( I'll email a screen shot.

Elisabeth

Thanks, Elisabeth!

My gmail account has also been hacked, so I've changed the password on that too.

I'm no longer getting the pop-ups on either Mamta's Kitchen or Creme de Languedoc. I wish I'd never entered the name of our house on Creme de Languedoc, since that info, made available by the phone company, allows people to view our property on Creme de Languedoc.

Since the dating service is for 'professional people', it's not hard to see why someone might want to ring a 'single' guy with a comfortable income and a nice house in the country with a big swimming pool!

I'd never have envisaged all this when I was growing up on the backstreets of the Southside in Edinburgh in the late 50's!

Phil

Thanks Elisabeth, screenshot definitely appreciated.

On reflection, the reason we NOW have dating site adverts popping up within the allocated Google Ads space is because Google Ads post context sensitive ads - that is the content of the page where the ad is placed is used to select the ad to be shown there.

Because we have a thread here talking about internet dating sites, that's what we're now being served as adverts by Google Ads.

Given that Phil's original problem ads were popups, they were not from our site, as we don't run any popup adverts at all.

We don't intrinsically have anything against dating sites per se (though if anyone spots anything offensive / not suitable for a wide audience, do please alert us with a screenshot or details).

If anyone gets a dating site advert on a page that isn't showing this thread (or any mention of dating sites), please also let us know.

Phew!

THANKS ALL.

x

Kavey

How do you get a screen shot?

Also, now that the problem is gone/resolvaed, wouldn't it be worth deleting this thread, so there is no mention of 'dating website' here, to attract word sensitive pop-ups?

I am getting an advert for "MatureDatingUK" on Mamta's Kitchen site this morning.

Is tis legitimate? Not that I have any intention of using it or even pressing the connection after Phil's experiences!

Winton

How about editing out the word 'dating' from this entire thread and replacing it with D****g. There will not be any word sensitive adverts linking to us then. Or this is a naff suggestion?

I don't think it's a big deal to leave this thread, as there doesn't seem to be any particularly offensive content served by Google in reaction to it, just regular dating site links.

When people are not viewing this thread, they won't get such content anyway.

And we've already established that the popups are not related to MK so changing content here won't make a difference to those.

Mamta,

while viewing a page that you want to take a screen shot of, press the "Prt Sc" button (some keyboards might have PRINT SCRN or other combos of the wording). Its normally up around the numbers on the top row or sometimes down the side on laptops and will probably share its use with "SysRq"..

Once pressed it has saved a copy of the screen to the clipboard (you won't actually see anything happen, no flashing, no clicks, nothing happens as far as you can tell). Open up a photo editting/painting package like Microsoft PAINT and then you should be able to PASTE the picture into it. Save it to your normal folders and there you go :-)

Steve

Got it! It is so simple, never realised this!!

Thanks :-)

You say this, Ma, but not only have I shown you exactly this several times in person, you wrote it down in that note book of instructions you had, so you wouldn't forget.

sigh

(Thanks Steve)

Dob't sigh! You should know by now that I forget things when I don't use them for a while;-)!

You at least managed to do it, Mamta: I'm struggling with the technical terms Steve uses. My teenage daughter just sighs and says, in French 'Never mind, dad'. This is accompanied by a pitying look.

Phil

Never mind Phil, we muddle along, don't we?

Phil which bits ?...

look for a button on the keyboard that has "PrtSc" on it. Its shortened from PRINT SCREEN (so anything along that line). When you press it, it simple stores into its memory a "grab" of the screen that is visible.

You don't see anything happen though, nothing changes, nothing pops up, so you might think it didn't do anything.

To see what its grabbed you need put the contents of the memory into a program that can deal with pictures. The most basic and available of these is MicroSoft Paint (if you are using windows based machines). Other programs like Photoshop (which adobe are giving away for free at the moment) or GIMP etc will also do it.

Open up the program (PAINT) and look in the menu for "PASTE" and it should then make the picture you have grabbed appear. Then deal with that as you would any picture you had painted/cropped etc, save it to your folder..

Steve

Absolutely! I don't know how to pre-programme the DVD recorder. Wish I did. The old screen connected to our oldest (= less than 4 years old) is like a cathode-ray tube. The guys in the computer workshop are amazed that this museum piece still works.

We've been through a ton of printers, but the one that's still working is the oldest: there's a message there!

When I turned up at the University of Texas at Austin in 2006 with floppy disks, they fell about laughing!

Phil

5.35 inch or 3.5 ?... :-)

Steve

Ma, thought that was the point of your writing them down in the book?!

;-P

Modern stuff, Steve - I grew up on 8 inch floppy disks :)

we had them at work but not seen them in home PCs ?

Steve

I remember the larger floppy disks, I remember tape cassettes, actually. Then smaller floppy disks, that were in hard cases, only floppy inside. Then the various media since then. ;-)

thanks to a google, this should make some of us twitch with memories...

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/08/the-history-of-computer-data-storage-in-pictures/

:-) enjoy..

Steve

Thanks, Steve!

I remember punched cards. I'm not 60 yet!

I remember sending email from the university on mainframe computers with terminals that weren't smart.

I wrote my first book on Wordstar.

Worse: I wrote my PhD on a typewriter! That was after I'd written it in longhand.

Anyone remember writing letters to friends?

We've just ditched all of our cassette tapes for work in the language lab.

Training in the new labs has been hard for me, but it's fab once you get the hang of even a little bit of it: I can now stick a USB key into my pc in the study at home and click on the sound file for each student, instead of lugging a bag of cassettes back home.

Get this: I'm about to buy a laptop! i'm doing this because I have transparencies for classes, but the technicians have thrown away the OHPs! All transparencies to Powerpoint files now. Even old gits like me have to update!

Phil

Phil, do you remember "penpals" ? before we had emails and google translate... you would wait weeks for a reply... lol

Steve

Steve: I was thinking of penpals the other day. Now people have countless 'friends' on the internet, and, apparently, you can actually buy 'followers' on, I think, Twitter, though I'm not sure about that.

What worries me about Twitter is that there is, apparently a very strict limit on the number of characters. A consequence of this is that, when politicians use Twitter to appear to be 'in touch', they're bound to over-simplify complex issues.

Phil

Yes people do apparently buy followers on twitter. Some surveys last year discovered that some of the celebs have bought 80% or more of their thousands and thousands of followers! Apparently it's so important to seem popular, it's worth their while. Seems pathetic to me.

that sounds scary, whats next people selling peoples twitter account details so people can add them in massive groups to bump up "popularity" ?

Steve

My worry is that there are young people who aspire to be, not plumbers, or electricians, or lawyers, or doctors, but celebs.

So, having lots of 'followers' makes you a 'celeb', of sorts.

Some clebs seem to be famous for being famous, without having shown any demonstrable talent for anything.

If you're a brilliant actor or singer, and become a celeb, that's one thing, but to become a celeb without ever having done anything is weird.

Phil

I know, it's a ridiculous situation.

So many kids aspiring not to do something with their lives but to be rich, be famous, be "important", the "how" is just the means to the end, they don't think about it, don't work for it, just want it... some even seem to feel they deserve it somehow.

GAH!

Being on the telly seems to amount to being real, somehow.

I've nothing against being on tv: when I was pursuing a political career, I did a fair amount of tv. I've deleted almost all of the videos. I kept one or two, just as a momento from a part of my life. I was never in it to be a star. I'm a very minor footnote to a footnote in British electoral history.

I can understand that my kids think it's cool to see their dad on tv videos, but they have to understand that there's a whole load of interesting stuff in life, apart from being in the public eye.

They're good-looking kids, but I don't want them going anywhere near modelling, which I take a very dim view of.

What's this obsession with physical appearance? There are all these young black women in South Africa bleaching their skins. What?? Black African skin is the most beautiful thing...

End of rant

Phil