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MMA sites and issues of malware, spyware, and other bad creatures
By Zach Arnold | December 21, 2008
Brandt DeLorenzo has this item today on his site about issues some web surfers have reportedly had when accessing the Sherdog web site. In short: claims are being made against Sherdog that pro-wrestling fans made for years against sites like 1Wrestling.com & PW Insider.
Personally, I haven’t had any trouble with these sites. However, I use Firefox as a browser. If you don’t already, go get Firefox and also download add-ons No Script and ABP (Adblock Plus). You’ll be happy that you did.
Topics: MMA, Media, Zach Arnold | 8 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback | Share This
I love Firefox, but Opera and Safari are good too. And I fucking hate 1Wrestling and PWInsider.
Oh, and using Firefox you get spell check when posting on message forums (including this one) so FIREFOX BOM-BA-YE!!!
This has been an issue with Sherdog for years. When they are selling your info, it’s much easier to afford a team of writers.
Except for the Fight Finder, I have found their website useless.
It could be worse. The MMANews.com website and forum are owned by ClickSpark LLC who are known for quite a few deplorable scams across the internet.
I don’t think Sherdog has control over their advertising space. In fact, Crave Online does I believe, and Crave Online isn’t exactly the cream of the crop when it comes to web security to its users.
First off – thanks Zach for picking this up and sharing. People on the MMA.tv UG forum have been complaining about this for a while now and are getting pretty fed up. I’m sure other forums and sites have visitors complaining of Sherdog and it’s time to really publicize this on a larger scale. We, as visitors, of Sherdog (and MMA fans) should never be subjected to sypware or adware on a website that attracts 50 million viewers a month (says Sherdog’s advertising page).
I mentioned CraveOnline as being a part of the whole problem in the article because it’s previous obvious that they are making a lot of extra money as well. They (CraveOnline) should’ve remove the affected advertising campaigns a long time ago and Jeff Sherwood should’ve dropped Crave when they continued to display these ads.
Sherwood and CraveOnline actually don’t make the money by selling information in this scenario. Money is made when all of those extra popups appear on the infected PC’s. Each popup = more $ for Sherdog/CraveOnline. Pretty sad that a ‘fan’ of the sport has resorted to this and told all of his viewers that it was their fault.
And it’s funnier for me because Sherwood e-mailed me (out of all people, I know) a couple months ago and asked why I had beef with him about his site. At that time, I felt pretty bad because he took the time to try to clear things up. But now, I say screw him and CraveOnline. Once he fixes the problem, we’ll go back to saying how he did a good thing by starting Sherdog.com back in the 90’s.
Leland,
This issue has been there before Crave was involved.
Thanks for that Zach!
Clears up the source of some isssues I have had lately too.
Thanks for posting this item, Zach. It helps us a lot when people run this kinda stuff.
As for the problems with Crave, there are a lot of things wrong with how they run their business, but we’re trying to sort some stuff out now.
We’ll see how that goes and probably post an update at some point in the near future.