I will be adding a page to this site. It's a page that's not going to make some people happy. It's simply a page containing a list of websites you should avoid.
Let me be as up front with something I have said till I'm blue in the face:
ONLINE ADS ARE THE NUMBER ONE SOURCE OF MALWARE INFECTIONS!
I have stressed this time and again. If you don't use an ad blocker (and dammit, they're free! Adblock Plus), you are putting your computer at risk. And yet people gleefully surf the web without an ad blocker. And when their computer gets infected they are at a loss to figure out why. For those people, please reference the previous statement.
Are the ads the problem? No. It's the source of the ads where the problem lies. The majority of online ads are third partied from ad providers. Not all ad providers allow the ads they sevre to be third partied to them, which makes it safer. But enough do, and don't give a damn from where it is coming, what scripting is being used, or what kind of special delivery of malware is being made via a browser visiting a site running their ad scripts.
Years ago almost everyone I knew with a computer had their computers infected by a fake anti-virus malware that would tell the computer user their computer was infected (well that sure as hell was correct, they infected it), and of course offer to remove the infection for a price. Most of those computers had to have windows re-installed; and one had to have the hard drive replaced. Which computer didn't get infected? The one running an ad blocker.
The internet has evolved from the days of simple HTML sites. The advances in scripting has allowed considerable interaction with websites making it easier to use them and allowing the website to be more useful. The danger from loading a website in your browser has evolved just as well.
Not all websites with ads or ad providers have malicious intent, nor represent a threat. Sites such as Google (and their associated services), Amazon and Facebook source their own advertising. In order for their ads to be a threat their own servers would have to be attacked. Such companies, being that the internet is their business, have firewall teams to protect their servers and deal with problems.
Most of us with our own websites do not have that capability. Yes, the hosting providers do protect their servers and have the people to deal with problems. But a blogger or webmaster pasting code into their webpages does not. What that code is serving has nothing to do with the hosting provider; they have no control over it.
Advertising has been around for a long time. Ads in magazines and on television are not a threat to anyone (unless you're stupid enough to swallow their BS). Online ads are not the same thing.
The list I have referred to is a blacklist of websites that either request for you to disable your ad blocker or add them to your whitelist, or, especially, sites that won't allow you entry unless you disable your ad blocker. This is usually given with a BS spiel about how ads make the internet happen and how you are stealing money from these poor greedy bastards by using an ad blocker rather than being truthful and say they don't give a damn about the risk to you so long as they make a few pennies before your computer crashes and burns.
Some of these are big websites with a long standing brick and mortar business like national newspapers. Some are popular websites started by fans in some hobby, say like horror movies, and have grown into an authority site. But it seems like 90% plus of the internet has ads, and many of the bigger sites don't need them as their income comes from sources other than internet ads, they're just being greedy by using the 'accepted norm'.
The blacklist will just be a suggestion of sites to boycott/block, unless they remove their walls and warnings in which case they will be removed from the list.
I'm not suggesting avoiding all sites with ads. I'm just strongly suggesting you use an ad blocker to protect your computer and blacklist those sites that want you to do otherwise.
If after all this talk, and I can be quite long-winded, and you get your computer infected and have not used an ad blocker, please reference the all caps message above one more time.
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