How to report annoying or intrusive ads on road.cc

Many things get the collective goat of the team here at road.cc beneath our mild exterior lurks a bubbling cauldron of rage and one thing in particular causes it to boil over – annoying and intrusive ads finding their way on to road.cc. Luckily they are fairly rare, but they are a recurring problem and one we’d like your help in fighting by reporting any you see on a new page we’ve created just for that purpose here.

These ads annoy us because they impact on your enjoyment of the site which in turn could lead to an increase in the use of ad blocking software which if it grew too large would ultimately lead to the death of road.cc something we’re very keen to avoid. It also annoys us that some advertisers try to get round the strict rules we have about the types of ads we will accept on road.cc and more importantly what we won’t accept. There are some ad formats you simply shouldn’t be seeing on road.cc.

‘And what are those?’ I hear you ask.

• Any ad that attempts to hijack or take over the main part of the screen
• Any auto-play video ad - especially looped ones you can’t turn off
• Any ad that attempts to auto-scroll your browser down the page - we REALLY hate those, but not as much as
• Any ad that redirects your browser to the app store or to another website - usually a redirect to a betting app or site.

The latter two are the most insidious annoying ads we have to deal with, luckily they are rare - though many sites have similar problems with them.

So how can you help? Well with our new Annoying and intrusive ad reporting page (snappy title eh?) we’d like your help in capturing as much information about these ads as possible – screen grabs of the offending advert, and if you can get it the ad code – we’ve even got a handy video showing you how to get the code.

That information gives the ad networks - who also want to deal with the problem – the necessary information to track down and block the sources of the offending ads.

Because of the way they work auto redirects are harder to deal with – a piece of code, which might be time limited, is injected into a seemingly innocuous ad which as it loads then deploys the redirect. The problem here being that because the redirect occurs before the page has loaded it’s hard/impossible to know which ad caused the problem. Even so, if you do find this happening to you it’s still worth you giving any information you can about what happened – obviously if by any chance the page did load before it redirected we’d love to know what was on it, but we’d also like to know where you were redirected too, and what if anything happened when you got there. We’d also like to know the browser and device you were using at the time.

Lots of you already take the time to let us know if an ad or a redirect has interfered with your use of the site - and we really appreciate it. With the new Intrusive ad reporting page we’re trying to make it even easier to let us know and for us to report such incidents to the ad networks we use.

As I say this is not a big problem – unless of course it’s affecting you – generally it’s caused by a handful of the hundreds of thousands of ads that are served on road.cc every day.