Bottiger

Administrator
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There have been rumors going on that Skial purposefully uses malware ads to get more money. This is not the case. There are no advertisers that solely serve malware, and we get less money for not using a full screen ad.

First of all, it is important to know that only a few people saw this ad and the ad was quickly removed. They were likely not even infected.

It is important to know how 99% of banners ads (what we used) work on the internet. This is what happens when you buy a banner ad.
  • Specify how much money you want to spend and targetting options like country.
  • Specify an image.
  • Specify the link when you click on the image.
  • None of these options allow you to add Java code to the ad.
Ads will be approved to make sure it isn't anything illegal. However after it is approved, someone can then change the destination to automatically send you to a malware page.

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So what does this mean?
  • When these things are found they are removed promptly.
  • This happens to anyone, even Google or Reddit. It is impossible to always make sure the destination doesn't change to something bad.
  • There aren't any advertisers who's sole purpose is to serve malware. That would be illegal.
Did your computer get infected?
  • You can't get infected just by looking at the ad. It is a picture with a link and that cannot infect you.
  • The anti-virus screenshots shows that they popup on any URL or image related to the virus. You cannot get infected by an image, and if you do not click on the image you would never have landed on an infected page.
  • Looking at the recent Java exploit, you will always be asked to run Java even if the applet is signed. There is no exploit to run without being prompted. You cannot get infected by Java if it never runs.
Here's a picture showing that the antivirus screenshots don't prove an infection took place. Here's proof that Avast categorizes images as viruses and categorizes them as "URL:Mal"

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Here are the links where people are spreading rumors.

/r/tf2
/r/games - Fortunately the moderators were unbiased enough to mark it as sensational
 
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Reactions: sov

Devin64156

Epic Skial Regular
Contributor
Nice job at holding your cool bottiger. I hope thigs will work out and just remember no matter what I am sticking with this comunity untill its final days.
 

YourMom

Mildly Menacing Medic
God people are fucktards.... none of them probably understand what an ad-server is, much less what a java exploit is..
 

KinCryos

TF2 Admin
Contributor
Mapper
personally, I wouldn't worry about Reddit. they have areas dedicated to Game Grumps and CP/Jailbait

not to mention all the content stolen from 4chan. maybe that's why it's called Reddit, as in "already read it"
 

OleGreg

Sufficiently Lethal Scout
Contributor
But doesn't it all sort of come down to the same thing? Clicking on ads from Skial might give you a virus. True, skial hasn't purposely infect the computers, but the damage has been done (reputation). On a side note for those in charge: Not sure if Server ads work the same as online new'sletters/blogs but I've had alot of success using Google Adsense, and as far as I've known my reader have never gotten a virus from clicking my ads (and the ads tend to be all ages appropriate.)

I've had 3 different people whisper me via steam and tell me I shouldn't be playing on the skial server due to malware.
 

Sharkey

Gaben's Own Aimbot
Contributor
As stated, it's a problem inherent to any self serve advertising solution, people are blowing the severity out of proportions. It's happened to yahoo, NY times, etc. Are people whispering you telling you not to go to any website with ads?

Adsense isn't a solution, they ban people that use their ads in the MOTD.
 

OleGreg

Sufficiently Lethal Scout
Contributor
Bummer on the Adsense. Good program. Nah they are just saying don't play on the servers. It was 3 people all yesterday that whispered me.

I was reading the reddit...it seems alot of gamers are angry that you guys didn't pull all your ads right away...many claiming you don't care about the players but you do the money...yikes!
 

Bottiger

Administrator
Bummer on the Adsense. Good program. Nah they are just saying don't play on the servers. It was 3 people all yesterday that whispered me.

I was reading the reddit...it seems alot of gamers are angry that you guys didn't pull all your ads right away...many claiming you don't care about the players but you do the money...yikes!

Adsense is also vulnerable to the same problem.

If you bother to dig into all the people complaining, you will find out that most of them are affiliated with other communities or one of the 10,000 people we've banned before. A lot of people hate us for having the most players. Unfortunately there is a lot of bias in the tf2 subreddit. Anyone unbiased would do the same thing as the Games subreddit and mark the thread as sensational.

There is this incorrect perception that anyone can cover 100% of the costs through donations and that anything else we make through advertisements is pure profit. This is wrong because we don't use the cheaper servers that most people do. And that is part of the reason why we have so many players.

So with this false belief, they think it is unreasonable for us to refuse to pull all our ads because 3 people out of thousands happened to get a bad one that was quickly removed.

We immediately reported the ad to the advertiser, but we are not removing all our ads. I doubt Reddit or Google would do differently. No one has reported seeing malware since the day of that thread and before it showed up on reddit.

I hope you'll be able to convince them to ignore the rumors being spread there.
 

OleGreg

Sufficiently Lethal Scout
Contributor
I am a little interested in how much your servers cost (I know it's not anyone's business but yours). I know after that incident with some of TF2 admins my group had, we created our own server. While populated it hasn't been easy it only cost 25 dollars a month, which is much cheaper then I thought. I'm guessing your servers cost more? Or that many people don't donate?

As for me personally I'm not trying to convince anyone to stop spreading rumors or have any agenda really. I haven't gotten a virus from you folks but it sounds other have. I don't mean to take sides but I do know that just about everyone online is self-serving and thus hard to trust. As you mention some of the people on Reddit might be spreading rumors just to discredit Skial...then again maybe skial is doing what serves skial best.
 

Bottiger

Administrator
We aren't going to reveal our costs because it is a lose lose situation for us.

If a competitor figures out we are getting a better server for less money then they are, then we will lose that advantage. And if they are spending more money then they will make up claims that our servers are worse because they cost less.

Anyone technical can generally tell the quality of our servers and get a rough idea, but keep in mind that some of our servers are 2+ years old and we did not re-order to get a price reduction because an IP change kills off players.

Generally people don't donate, and our servers are much better than a $25 server like gameservers.com. It is easy to find 1 person willing to donate for a specific server, but the fact is that these people get tired of the game at unpredictable times, or threaten to quit over small issues. We also try to support less popular servers like lobby. Also things like this forum cost money.
 

takethepants

Australian Skial God
Contributor
I am a little interested in how much your servers cost (I know it's not anyone's business but yours). I know after that incident with some of TF2 admins my group had, we created our own server. While populated it hasn't been easy it only cost 25 dollars a month, which is much cheaper then I thought. I'm guessing your servers cost more? Or that many people don't donate?

As for me personally I'm not trying to convince anyone to stop spreading rumors or have any agenda really. I haven't gotten a virus from you folks but it sounds other have. I don't mean to take sides but I do know that just about everyone online is self-serving and thus hard to trust. As you mention some of the people on Reddit might be spreading rumors just to discredit Skial...then again maybe skial is doing what serves skial best.

Unrelated to TF2, I've been in a business that took donations. It had about 100,000 active users and even though you choose whatever you wanted to donate about 5% of people donated and that was generally between $5-$10. So once you get past a few hundred users the percentage of people that donate is so small and helps fill in some gaps maybe, but it'll almost never make up the bulk of your operating costs. The only exception I've seen to this is Wikipedia.

Also, like Bottiger said, that $25 is not what it costs to run a decent server. That $25 gets you a shared server with shared bandwidth. With a small group that's fine, but it's nowhere near consistent in terms of stability and bandwidth. Also, keeping many servers in sync with plugins is impossible buying from something like gameservers (or even installing custom plugins). You need VPSs at least that give you root access to keep configurations and such in sync. I don't think it would be wise of us to screw our users. So we're being truthful about everything and like Bott said, it was one ad that was taken down and fixed. Shit happens and we work through it.