26

I was reading about hash functions on Wikipedia when this ad popped up. I was appalled and flabbergasted and annoyed to find advertisements akin to this one dotting my article like sprinkles on a cupcake.

Annoying popups appear after you hover over them.

Annoying ads on Wikipedia

I now notice that these ads are appearing on any web page I visit including Superuser.

Why? How can I get rid of them?

By the way, these ads have the very gall to surface on Superuser, as seen here: Ads on superuser

David Faux
  • 4,899

4 Answers4

51

This is usually caused by "malicious" extensions, and removing the extension will normally solve the problem.

Paul
  • 61,193
19

It looks like someone downloaded a "free game" that came with some scummy advertising stuff. Just uninstalling the plugin won't get rid of everything:

Luckily, from the sounds of it, they're pretty good about actually uninstalling when you uninstall.

Plutor
  • 561
3

In case the official instructions don't work, or even if they do, you might want to run an adware removal tool such as Ad-Aware. For every piece of malware that asserts its existence you are likely to have a dozen or so that do not.

fluffy
  • 658
-6

Can also be because that website was running short of money and decided to accept ads - Wikipedia in particular was running short of money, but I have no information on whether they decided to accept ads.

If so, an antivirus program or an antispyware program will probably NOT remove the ads.

I've found a program that claims to remove even those, but I haven't tried it:

http://simple-adblock.com/

milesrf
  • 52