How can I report bad ads?
A bad ad might be an ad that attempts to serve malware, adware or viruses, pop-ups and pop-unders on sites that don't utilise those ad formats, javascript prompts warning users they've got a virus on their system when they don't, ransomware, scripts that won't let you close your browser window, and so on and so forth. Typically, a lot of these issues are simply solved by keeping your browser and OS up to date as all the modern mainstream browsers have built in defences against such attacks. However, many people don't keep their systems up to date, which is by-and-large when most of the security issues come to a head.
Please ensure that your system and browser is free from any malware or adware that may be affecting your experience. For windows systems, more information can be found here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/comprehensive-security
If you are confident that the advertisment you are seeing is being served by our providers, in order to help us in our endeavours to find the bad ad and the agency responsible for displaying it as fast as possible, we need detailed information from you. And the sooner you provide us with this information, the sooner we can inform our provider who can get to work on finding and fixing the issue for all of us.
To report a bad ad:
While logged into your account, please visit the appropriate reporting area in our forums, here: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/forum/4100-report-bad-ads/
- Let us know what anti-malware/adware/virus software you have on your PC and ensure you've run a scan that returns clean before reporting the ad to us.
- The date and time you saw this ad.
- The URL of the page you were on at the time, e.g. http://www.nexusmods.com/games/?
- Your general location - e.g. I live in Exeter, in Devon, in England. If you don't want to give the city you live in, then your state and country will suffice, e.g. Devon, England.
- A good description of what is happening that makes you think this is a bad ad. An example might be, "I was browsing the site, but immediately upon loading the page at http://www.nexusmods.com/games/? I was redirected to another website that told me I had a virus on my PC that I had to pay money to remove".
- If you get redirected or sent to another site, provide the URL that you are sent to.
- A screenshot of the bad ad really, really, REALLY helps us out as well. Please take the time to do a print-screen or use the snipping tool in windows (press the start menu, type "snipping", click "snipping tool") and upload it to your report for us to view. The snipping tool is an extremely simple and intuitive piece of software for taking pictures of what's on your screen.
Malware, adware and viruses are prevalent across the world, infecting billions of systems. It's extremely difficult for us to know whether the bad ad you're seeing is actually being caused by our advertising code, or by malicious code running on your own system. Please ensure you're running adequate anti-malware software on your system, that it's up-to-date, and that it has run since seeing this ad and returned clean.
Please remember that without these details and an accurate description about the bad ad there isn't much we can do about it.