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Feb 16, 2017
1:05:38pm
El Jefe Get off my lawn!
Does the Arby's ad drive you crazy? A report on what I've been up to. (Also, you may want to use Firefox or Edge)
I've never seen it, but it drives me crazy, too. I often get several complaints a day about it, on bad days as many as 20.

One of the first things I did was block ads related to the arbys.com domain. This didn't seem to have any affect. This isn't terribly surprising, as I think that only blocks ads served by Google directly, not ads served by one of their affiliated ad networks. It's also possible that the domain they're using is different, but I haven't seen any evidence of that.

I was able to get some information from a browser's Inspector feature in order to learn more about the ad. I can't remember who sent it, but thank you! Initially, I'd seen that it is using the Vidible.tv video player, which is owned by AOL. I have a contact at AOL, who passed the information on to his company's ad team. They said it's not an AOL ad, other ad networks use their video player. While I was waiting for his contact to look at it, I blocked AOL's ads from serving on CougarBoard. I continued to get complaints, so I'm inclined to believe them.

The ad says it's from "T2TV', and it contains a bunch of references to moatads.com. All of the moatads.com references seem to be for a pixel ad tracker, so I'm not sure that they're the ones actually serving the ads. Google's ad service has over 2900 affiliated ad networks, and none of them contain "moat" in them. There are three that contain "t2", but those don't seem to be related to "T2TV"; for example, one is "AutoScout24".

Going to moatads.com redirects to moat.com, which appears to be an ad analytics service, so my guess that they're just a tracker seems likely. I think they might also serve their own ads, though. You can try going to https://moat.com/advertiser/arby-s?report_type=display to see a view of Arby's ads they either serve or track, I'm not sure which. Maybe you can let me know which ad on there is the problem.

I haven't been able to find any information on T2TV. All I have to gone on is this:
<!-- TAG START { player: "H_[DBMUK H92]", type: acustom, owner: "T2TV", for: "T2TV" } -->


There's also a reference to "t2v" in the code, so I think it's actually that. Searching for "t2v" on Google brings up interesting results:
T2V.TV ads are ruining my internet experience
anyone else having problems with the T2V.TV ad creating so much lag that you cannot play agames?

One of the other results is for a site that claims the ads are actually being served by malware installed on your computer. That's possible, but I'm not convinced; I'd need to get more information from those who are seeing it about whether they're seeing it elsewhere as well. It does have some good general tips for cleaning up your system, and it also includes (at the very bottom) how to block it by adding the relevant domain to your hosts file. I'd be curious if that fixes it for people.

I will continue to try to block this ad (and the seemingly related Whataburger ad), and I appreciate your help in making that possible.

UPDATE: As noted below in the thread, I have discovered that the ad has only ever been reported by people using Chrome. If you've received the ad in another browser, please let me know. I'm not sure why the ad would target Chrome like that.
This message has been modified
Originally posted on Feb 16, 2017 at 1:05:38pm
Message modified by El Jefe on Feb 16, 2017 at 2:06:48pm
Message modified by El Jefe on Feb 16, 2017 at 2:07:10pm
El Jefe
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El Jefe
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