Minecraft Forums

To prevent (unnecessary) TL;DRs I'll keep this short. Regardless of whether or not mod developers and artists get a few pennies here or there simply doesn't matter. Adf.ly doesn't have anyone's interests in mind but their own, and apparently those interests would including delivering thousands of victims into the hands of criminals. It's time for ad.fly links to be banned from the forums.

Over the last few weeks I've watched things get worse and worse with that lot... The annoying delays were always what they were supposed to be, an annoyance you sat through while you waited for the full-page ad to load. ...and then a few weeks ago we started seeing misleading "CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD" links which were not what someone was being directed through adf.ly for. Clearly they were just counting on people who aren't used to ad.fly clicking on those, generating a somewhat bogus referral click, and having to come back a second time to see the actual click-through in the upper right hand corner. The fake download links initially went to some shifty-looking sites, and then later started returning highly questionable executables. The screenful of phony download links should have been enough to result in their summary banning from use all by itself--I'm somewhat surprised to have not seen people carping about the executables. Now, I could go and do a whole detailed investigation, but no one's paying me so screw that this is what you get. I'm now pretty damn convinced they're handing out trojan-ware and malware to visitors. If people were wondering where the 'hacks' that are stealing Minecraft credentials are coming from, well... You don't have to look real far. Ad.fly is staring you right in the face as very likely the responsible party.

Today they've gone a step further and aren't even showing you a page of phony download links anymore, they just bounce you straight to a "sticky" full-page lead-gen scam ad. They'll likely claim it was a mistake or it was a bad actor buying referrals from them, and that will be a lie.

Moderators: Ban ad.fly now. This has gone on for too long.

Artists/Programmers: Stop using ad.fly. The only thing you're doing is delivering victims into the hands of criminals for a handful of nickles.

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/398180-poll-and-discussion-use-of-adfly/

I disagree. Mod developers spend a lot of time making our mods and deserve a little money for that. They can use Adfly for that little money without anyone actually having to donate.

People should be used to downloading this enough to know that those huge "download now" buttons are fake and notice the "skip ads" at the top right. Whenever I go to a file hosting website I have never seen before to download something, I never click on the big "download now" banner ads. In addition, most people have Adblock for firefox/chrome which removes all ads.

Also, this is in the wrong section.

TL;DR: Adfly shouldn't be banned, wrong section

Click "Skip ad" smart guy.

I agree with you. The first time I used ad.fly I almost clicked on the wrong thing not seeing the skip ad button at the top. That easily could have been something malicious.

People can figure it out quickly enough, except for the ones foolish enough to download executables instead of a texture pack.