I enabled soon after I started editing/validating because things were starting to get hung up then. And then later, I was validating some more, and was in the middle of editing a vehicle and it just froze up. That's when I posted here, and when the vehicle finally finished processing the edit (it literally took about 4-5 minutes for one edit), I checked the admin tools and saw that the blocker was stopped, so I enabled it again. Things did start moving faster at that point.

I did a small change to automatically block the two worse bots between 7pm and 7am CET (times of site & forum) as these are usually the peak times.

It's a web crawler to train Chinese AI so I would definitely block it completely... https://darkvisitors.com/agents/bytespider

Here's someone that wrote a successful counter-attack: https://community.f5.com/discussions/technicalforum/bytespider-webcrawler-unintentional-dos/327450
probably only temporarily because "I've implemented a browser verification challenge, which initially seemed to slow it down, but the crawler eventually bypassed that."

In the comment below he said he could successfuly filter it by just blocking all what contains "Bytespider" (and indeed in my case I filter it with just that part).

In case of IMCDb, as long as it identifies as something specific, it is easy to filter or block, I just put the filter in the start of the file that is included in every page of the site.
But in general I prefer not to block completely all these, otherwise they may end up trying to get around via another name that we have to find again and block again

Any way to stop the Discover Card ads? They are the latest bottom page ad intrusion. It looks like it is supposed to be in the normal ad box but instead appears at the bottom of the page and blocks you from any function. You have to refresh to get rid of it.

I'll report them
Do someone else have issues with these?
It is strange it is always you and always the same style of issue
I don't know what could cause it on your computer though.

They are investigating, and will block that ad in the meantime.
One thing you can try in such case is to report the ad via the link at the bottom left (cf attached image).
That link does not appear on your screenshot but maybe it appears where the ad is supposed to be originally? (i.e. top right box of the page)

Somebody else was having this problem, rjluna maybe? It's on one of the previous pages of this thread.


I guess I should have taken a screen shot from the top of the page, so you could see the empty box where the ad should be. The ads here seem to say just 'Ad" instead of "Report Ad", when you click on that button then you can report the ad as "Animated, Offensive or Misleading"



Sorry about the weird formatting, I had just resized a bunch of pics to 640x480 and forgot to reset.

@night cub: Re to the Discover card ad blocking the page. I no longer have that problem now.

What did you do?

Nothing, it stop doing that to me

A donate button would be less annoying than ads, and might actually earn more. Just try it for a month antp.

Are the ads so annoying though?
well except for night cub which has this strange issue, for the others the ads are supposed to be rather discreet. And it is always possible to block them for those who do not like them.

Ads create a bad user experience. I block them on Firefox but many people don't know how. I often see youtube comments about the ads so they actually sit through videos with constant interruption. Even on a static page they're always flashing to get attention. It's pretty rude.

Normally those on the site do not flash either (and do not even have animations, or very subtle ones)

The ads don't bother me unless they become intrusive. The problem is some of the ads that are supposed to sit in the right-side box on most pages have been popping up at the bottom of the page instead as a full-width pop-up that blocks any function on the page.

After several days of not getting any Discover ads, they started appearing again today.

I don't know what is going on, but both the site and the forum are running super slow right now.

Site is very slow right now.

Though they have nothing in comment, they are not even on the same continent