dslreports logo
Search similar:


uniqs
14582

stadams
Premium Member
join:2000-10-27
Arizona

stadams

Premium Member

Zoneedit now forcing ad popups

I assumed at some point the free ride would be over with Zoneedit and it appears that's now the case. I was quite disturbed to find out that one of the domains I admin suddenly started to have these popups going to casalemedia.com. Now, I went through my pages to verify that the code did not somehow make it's way on there. Things came up clean. Then I noticed this in the source code of the cloaked forwarding page that comes from Zoneedit...

<HTML><HEAD>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="site.net">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="">
</HEAD>
<FRAMESET border=0 rows="100%,*" frameborder="no" marginleft=0 margintop=0 marginright=0 marginbottom=0>
<frame src="http://site.dnsalias.net:81" scrolling=auto frameborder="no" border=0 noresize>
<frame src="/pop-src-page.script" topmargin="0" marginwidth=0 scrolling=no marginheight=0 frameborder="no" border=0 noresize>
</FRAMESET>
</HTML>

Notice the /pop-src-page.script code. Since this is unacceptable to me, I shot off an e-mail to Zoneedit asking if they were aware of it. Apparently they are quite aware of it since it is intentional. Here is the response back from them today...

Dear Sir,

The popup ads are a recent addition to our free web forwarding service.
ZoneEdit was recently purchased by Dotster, and it's their policy to
include popup ads on free accounts that use web forwarding.

With the purchase of one zone credit, popup ads are disabled. One zone
credit is $10.95, and quantity discounts are available.

Let me know if you still have any other questions. Thank you.

Best Regards,
Grace
ZoneEdit Support

Now I realize things can't always be free, but in this case, I felt something like this should have been communicated to their subscribers and I never heard anything from them. I just happened to notice the popups and investigated it.

Anyway, the purpose of this rant is just to let you know the situation with Zoneedit now and to suggest that you find other means of cloaking your actual Web address if you are opposed to popups on your sites. Who isn't?
inTulsa
Premium Member
join:2002-02-24

inTulsa

Premium Member

I sure hope their other services will stay clean and free. Otherwise Dotster might get a bad reputation if they screw over all the ZoneEdit users.

Though I don't use the cloaking option, ZoneEdit has always been dependable for DNS and mail forwarding facilities. Are there any other truly reliable alternatives?
tradergordo
join:2002-12-23
Phoenixville, PA

1 edit

tradergordo

Member

Well I didn't notice any problems until just last night. Whatever changes they made, apparently it was catastrophic for me all of a sudden. I try to get to my website, and all I get is a pop-up ad, but my site does not load, I just see a blank page. Not sure what is going on yet. Perhaps my dynamic IP software is no longer able to update the IP with zoneedit because of the changes (I can't even get to zoneedit.com anymore). At any rate, the pop-up ads are also unacceptable to me. I guess I'll either look for another service, or pay up.

big greg
MVM,
join:2003-10-11
Boston, MA

big greg to stadams

MVM,

to stadams
Cloaking, where your site appears in a frame, is bogus technology anyways. Go ahead and move up to shared hosting, if you can. You can find it for $6/month.

Otherwise, if you insist on using your broadband connection and your ISP allows it, you can use their Dynamic DNS service, where you buy a domain name somewhere, you run DDNS client software, and they give out your address-of-the-day.
tradergordo
join:2002-12-23
Phoenixville, PA

tradergordo

Member

Yea, but for not so serious sites, $0/month is a lot better than $6/month

big greg
MVM,
join:2003-10-11
Boston, MA

1 edit

big greg

MVM,

You can have dynamic dns for free from ZoneEdit... you pay just for the domain, $9/year. Way better than cloaking.

If you aren't that serious about your content, then you can't really complain about popups showing up along with your content.
tradergordo
join:2002-12-23
Phoenixville, PA

tradergordo

Member

Oh, so the pop ups are only when cloaking is used? I can't remember why I used cloaking to begin with, but I thought it was required for something I was trying to do...
I guess I'll just try to use zoneedit without cloaking.

big greg
MVM,
join:2003-10-11
Boston, MA

big greg

MVM,

Yeah, if they just host your DNS records, they just hand out a number, no opportunity for a popup (unless they somehow start proxying all the web sites that they have DNS records for, routing the traffic through proxy servers, which could prove to be rather expensive in terms of bandwidth).
big greg

big greg to tradergordo

MVM,

to tradergordo
said by tradergordo:

I guess I'll just try to use zoneedit without cloaking.
See »www.zoneedit.com/doc/dyn ··· mic.html
tradergordo
join:2002-12-23
Phoenixville, PA

tradergordo to big greg

Member

to big greg
Oh, I remember now. Its because my ISP blocks some ports, so I had to use cloaking to send requests to a specific non-standard port. Unfortunately, the pop-up is the least of my problems, ever since they made some change at zoneedit just this weekend, I can't get to my website at all even though zoneedit has the correct dynamic IP, that IP is not propagating. If I ping my address, I do NOT get the correct IP.

I'm not entirely sure if this problem of the IP not propagating has anything to do with cloaking or the new pop-up ad changes they have made at zoneedit (?) It has been more than 24 hours since the IP change...

big greg
MVM,
join:2003-10-11
Boston, MA

big greg

MVM,

Well if your ISP is blocking incoming port 80 then they probably don't want you running a web server either

Perhaps your ISP is now blocking Dynamic DNS traffic?
tradergordo
join:2002-12-23
Phoenixville, PA

tradergordo

Member

Well, the problem I was having, is fixed now, but I'm not sure what I did (if anything) to fix it. I just think zoneedit was having serious problems (which is unusual, I've never had any problems with them in the past).

I also bought a "zone credit", but I am currently still seeing popups, so I'm not sure how that is supposed to work. Perhaps the IP address propagating only happened after I bought the zone credit? Again, not sure...

Steve
I know your IP address

join:2001-03-10
Tustin, CA

Steve to stadams

to stadams
said by stadams:

Now I realize things can't always be free, but in this case, I felt something like this should have been communicated to their subscribers and I never heard anything from them. I just happened to notice the popups and investigated it.
Why isn't the appearance of adsa sufficient communication? Would you have done anything differently had you gotten an email saying "Free accounts will display ads" before you logged into your free account and saw the ads?

Steve

stadams
Premium Member
join:2000-10-27
Arizona

stadams

Premium Member

To answer your question, I would have moved my DNS records like I did after finding out on my own. My main issue with this was that I thought my site had been hacked and it freaked me out at first seeing all these popups generated from MY Web site. After digging a little, it became obvious what happened and the reason I sent them an e-mail asking about it. If they had simply sent an e-mail to communicate the changes or posted a faq on their site, I would have been prepared and known what was going on. No biggie really, after all is said and done, you just do what you can do and move on to something else if you don't like changes a company makes. I don't have any regrets, they were rock solid while I used them, but I'm not interested in popups on any of my cloaked sites so I moved on.
tradergordo
join:2002-12-23
Phoenixville, PA

tradergordo

Member

So just curious - where did you move on to? I did a little searching yesterday, but couldn't find a similar free DNS with cloak service. I found "DNSexit" which gives free (no ads) cloaking IF you transfer your domain registration to them ($12/year) which I guess isn't that bad, they also offer their own IP updater tool for dynamic ips. Is there anything out there that is better and/or free and ad free?

I guess since I just bought a zone credit, I'll be with zone edit for at least another year. By the way, the pop up ads DID stop after I bought the credit (it just took an hour or so).

LeeBee
It's Dark Out There
join:2003-06-18
Swissieland

LeeBee to stadams

Member

to stadams
dnsexit I've been using for a couple of years now but don't use cloaked forwarding - that's EVIL

I've bought no domains services anything from them.

Highly recommended then