My solution to Zango. Everyone should do this
 

I've parsed my server logs and altho it accounts for 1% of the traffic I still believe its something that should be prevented as soon as possible.
Among the solutions proposed here I think another one is to inform the user.

Preview Here

If you want to inform your surfers you can create a landing page like that or use mine and add the following .htaccess code to your sites:


I've added it to a couple of my sites and will add it to all.
If all big traffic sites would use something like this we could accomplish something.

nice idea, but that page reads like those annoying anti-spyware popups. the text and layout will have to be done in a way that surfers actually stop and read it.

I like that a lot
i was wondering if there was a way to do that

It is an anti-spyware popup :)

Ofcourse it can be better.

I think its more the .htaccess and general idea that he is trying to get across - not his public relation skills :2 cents:

Glad to see that someone else thinks its time to do something, rather than just bitch about it.

its a good idea! :)

Looks promising.

To make it less aggravating for your visitors and to make it seem less like you are hijacking them yourself, you could simply direct those with Zango's toolbar (or any like it) to an alternate main page.

Since these visitors are likely to be hijacked anyway, it would not be any great real loss to use (some of) your usual promo space on such pages to warn against scumware and provide links to sites (or set up your own page) offering info on how to remove it.

there is a thread on another forum about the new way google is presenting a warning page before people enter a site....someone who was getting hundreds of thousands of hits a day was down something like 50% of his traffic because of that extra step to get into his site

give a surfer any extra steps, and they won't bother

I can easily script a zero size image which when seen by an infected user it would show a banner linking to a page with info, thing is
how many webmasters are going to use such a thing ?

right, but in this case the user is certainly infected and your chance of
making a sale is close to zero. So no real loss.

If you run a TGP this thing will just kill it. So it's not a way out.

so you're saying that it doesn't matter what kind of traffic you have
as long as its a lot of it.
This is why this industry is shit.

mind you, tgps are probably the core reason of this mess because they jerk surfers around sending them to all kind of installers.

surfers don't care.

tgp's are the root of a lot of evil in the online porn industry

12clicks speaks the truth

possible.
But I think first of all they're not informed enough to care.

Well, instead of the warning page, you could just create a second version of your mainpage, let's call it youareinfected.html and change the rewrite rule accordingly. On top of this page, you place a Zango warning, below it the html from your mainpage.

Lazy visitors will just click your thumbs/trades/etc as normal, referrer for the trades on other sites will be your domain as usual. So, no visitors are lost and you show a warning.

Thats right - if we do our job right they just go in the direction we point them.

and hope there are no distractions on the way. :upsidedow

The best learning experiance I had was sitting my step father in front of a computer and telling him to find some porn.....

You don't even need that you can use javascript to detect Zango
and if its infected you just add an extra link on your main page.

Huh? Man, my tgp sends first click to galleries and it's totally clean site and since Zango has added my main sponsor to it's fucking toolbar or something I have only seen one sign-up and have my traffic counted by the sponsor decreased to as low as 20-30 clicks per day.
Should I then actually redirect a given surfer somewhere? Fuck no as this will mean I will totally kill my site.
Should I change a sponsor? Well, no guaratee a new one will convert as well as no guarantee my site won't die because of low prod.

I wasn't reffering to your tgp but tgps in general.
But if your surfers have Zango installed it would be better to warn them
than sending them to sponsors first where you have little chances of making sales.
Not necesarely a redirect, you can use a banner to point to a warning page or anything.

Zango can't be the only problem there budy... it's less then a 5 % of your traffic for sure.

Not every sponsor program buys traffic from Zango - there is only a potential to lose sales if the traffic is sent to a sponsor that is purchasing zango traffic. So, the statement in bold is an unwarranted fear and not a good reason to use a script such as yours. Im not saying that it is a bad thing to inform the surfers - but to do it for the reason stated above is irrational.

Thats why you start denying them access to your websites and they will care :)

Yes..but if you have AFF as a top banner on a tgp and a surfer click on it...the surfer are for sure lost true a popup hell :2 cents:

thats wrong.
even if the respective sponsor its not buying zango traffic
anyone can take away that traffic.

Actually its less than half of 1%

Your point being? Even if it's only 0.5%, it's still theft.

it is theft
but it wasn't brought up by anyone so far and whoever says its going broke because of this is full of shit.

Can you use javascript to change the focus to 'self' if it isn't already and then close all other windows on the page that might be open on detection of the Zango visitor?

I dont think js can close pages it didn't open itself. I might be wrong.

p.s. i think you should change the zangotoolbar to plain zango with wildcards on both sides because i think sometimes it doesnt say zangotoolbar just zango

it always uses Zangotoolbar.
but ofcourse you knew that from few days ago :)

You can't spell. :thumbsup

thanks for your valuable contribution :)

Make it look more like a 404 warning page

had anyone closed any acocnts from zango?

thats a bit delicate.
If I use your refcode to buy traffic from zango, would you like your account closed ?

If sending maybe 1% of your traffic to a page wher ethey can click to get back is going to kill your site then you have a much bigger problem than Zango.

If it's as insignificant as you've been trying to imply then you should have no problem stopping your stealing traffic from webmasters.

to some extent surfers dont care at all ... i remember alot of my friends PC's were just full of spyware, if I wanted to check a site from friends, some of them, would say things like "just close all those popups when IE comes up, it does that" im sure I'm not the only one that has heard that kind of warning from friends.

Zango is owning this industry :(

"Zango owning industry"...

But what will happen if we decide to close our sites because there just isn't enough money in it anymore. Will zango still make money?

Didnt you read?
Lars has plenty of money to burn next month!

How long until Zango just stops stuffing their name in the User-Agent? Two? Three releases? :(

thanks I am sure this will solve the problem

sadly, that horse has left the barn long ago.

Sites needed to block google toolbar surfers from their sites.

btw, heres another page where you can redirect the traffic
http://www.adwaresucks.com/zango/
or make your own.