This is one of those infernal ”you have won____” type ads and the x doesn’t work and… Yccch!
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That would happen to me and I reported it several times, but they don’t care - it is their ad engine causing it, of course.
I switched browsers and the blockers are better so it doesn’t happen on the new browser.
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If it was a Walmart ad, I got it, too. I think it was either on Thanksgiving or the day after, which is probably why the Chowhound tech team didn’t get rid of it right away.
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I think it was, now that you mention it.
Super annoying. And I doubt it had anything to do with Chowhound’s ad engine. It looked a lot more like malware to me.
No.
For me it was a persistent issue on safari. If I had looked at amazon, or walmart, or other commerce site, the hijack page took over whatever CH page I was on, with a “you won $1000” or whatever for the site you had visited earlier. Happened quite often, I took screen shots and posted to the site feedback threads, but since it’s the ad sites they’re getting paid for, there was little incentive for them to do anything.
Never happens anymore now that I switched browsers and the ad blocking for that hijacking annoyance is more effective.
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Here’s more information about the Walmart Gift Card popup. It’s a virus.
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Exactly. Ugh.
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Same but Chrome for Android
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To paraphrase the old (in Internet years) saw… ad-blockers (and script blockers) are your friends…
If I continued to lurk/post on CH at this point for any reason other than deeply ingrained habit, I might whitelist or selectively allow some advertising there, but as it is I don’t. The site still “works” fine…
I’m on iPhone running 12.1. No other spam gets thru. That’s what’s so frustrating.
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Yes, same here.
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Yup - I looked a few days ago on my phone because someone on FB told me that someone had talked about a pumpkin-cranberry bread recipe I had posted many years back…and got the same damn pop-up. I just closed out of my browser (Chrome) and didn’t go back until I was on my laptop with an ad blocker enabled.
I drive by Chowhound - I’ve seen a few of my old threads resurrected and some of the same people up to the same old tricks! I never go on my phone or ipad - only on my pc - love ad blocker!
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I still go to Chowhound, and occasionally post. And I’ve won two cookbooks. Gonna try for Snoops "Crook to Cook! "
I went over this week to look for an old thread. What an exercise in frustration.
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I saw this brilliant tip somewhere ages ago: do a site-specific google search, bec the CH search is garbage (and they don’t care)
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That’s what I do! I Google my name+Chowhound(+the subject if I have something in mind. ).
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I Google my name+Chowhound(+the subject if I have something in mind. ).
That should do it, mostly, but if you want to strictly limit your results only to hits on Chowhound, you can also use Google’s “site” operator (site:) followed by the domain name, where the domain can include the wildcard asterisk. (Which doesn’t really make a difference searching CH, but can be very useful on some sites, or the thing I use it for most often, eliminating the myriad, mushroom-like Pinterest sites from searches that tend to bring up things some people have an inordinate fondness for “pinning”
… by prefixing (prefacing?) the word site with the hyphen/negative sign.)
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Interesting! I’m going to have to read that a few more times. 
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