Starship Asterisk*

Whenever I get on the internet, random words are highlighted in blue and underlined, as if they were links. If I put my cursor over the word, a small window appears that has a random ad, usually a $1000 Walmart gift card. For example, on the APOD site, the word "Sun" is one of those words. On the Asterisk*, the word "science" in the user's rank is another. It drives me crazy. Does anyone else have this problem? Is there a way to get rid of it? I have IE7 by the way.

Sounds like you have been infected by adware. Spybot is a free, effective way of removing adware. I use it in conjunction with McAfee, even though McAfee wanted me to remove it. I just told McAfee to ignore the Spybot directories, and it is quite happy.

Those are "ad bubbles" or some such ludicrous term. Check your browser settings regarding blocking ads.

This page and many others you can Google have more information on the problem.

Rob

TNT wrote:Whenever I get on the internet, random words are highlighted in blue and underlined, as if they were links. If I put my cursor over the word, a small window appears that has a random ad, usually a $1000 Walmart gift card. For example, on the APOD site, the word "Sun" is one of those words. On the Asterisk*, the word "science" in the user's rank is another. It drives me crazy. Does anyone else have this problem? Is there a way to get rid of it? I have IE7 by the way.

You have some sort of malicious browser addon running. These frequently result from allowing third-party toolbars- Google, Yahoo, and others. Never install browser toolbars! If you have any, try removing them (it can sometimes be difficult). I don't recommend using security software in general, but there are tools you can download which can find and remove these sorts of things on demand (that is, you choose to run them, they don't run all the time in the background). There are some useful tools at Spychecker.com.

IE7 is unsafe. If you are unable to run IE8 or IE9 (because of your OS), I'd suggest Firefox or Chrome, both of which are a lot more resistant to being taken over- and generally easier to fix if you accidentally allow an addon to install.

I was finally able to get rid of those text-enhance links, but not the ways you all provided, although I thank you for helping. I went to the text-enhance website and it had an option to opt out of seeing the links. I clicked it, typed in a captcha, and a message said "you have been opted out of seeing the links. A cookie has been added to stop text-enhance from displaying these links."

Cookies.

Cookies. I can't believe I hadn't thought of that. I could have just deleted the text-enhance cookie.

TNT wrote:I was finally able to get rid of those text-enhance links, but not the ways you all provided, although I thank you for helping. I went to the text-enhance website and it had an option to opt out of seeing the links. I clicked it, typed in a captcha, and a message said "you have been opted out of seeing the links. A cookie has been added to stop text-enhance from displaying these links."

Cookies.

Cookies. I can't believe I hadn't thought of that. I could have just deleted the text-enhance cookie.

This approach doesn't mean you aren't being tracked. A better solution is to use an active ad blocker, like Adblock Plus in Firefox (there are options for other browsers, as well, except perhaps for IE... and why would anybody use IE?) That blocks the links before they ever get to your browser, so not only do you not see them, neither do tracking engines.

Haha, I like it... "So yeah we hijacked your browser with some sneaky and malicious code but you can opt out of it if you want. It's still there, doing who knows what, but you can opt out."

After reading all this, I am seriously thinking of switching to Google Chrome.

I don't get any of that stuff with my IE9.

Finally found the problem. There was a suspicious program called "I Want This" in my Programs and Features folder made by some company called 215 Apps. Who knows what that is or how it got in there, but I uninstalled that program, and now none of those Text Enhance links appear anymore!

One moment to accidentally install... 3 months to get rid of it.

geckzilla wrote:One moment to accidentally install... 3 months to get rid of it.

Honestly, I don't know how it got in there in the first place. I don't download anything I don't trust.

Beyond wrote:I don't get any of that stuff with my IE9.

Actually, I downloaded IE9 just a month ago, and those links appeared even after. That opt-out cookie actually worked for a while until they came back, and I tried opting out again, but it didn't work, even after trying several times. Anyway, I just hope that those links stay away.