Easy AdSense Warning

let the author answer for himself again

Please take a look at the FAQ, the first question. And the one on “Ad Space sharing” as well.

This guy just pops his own ads on your site if you install this plugin. Even though I switched of all the options which allows him to pop ads or share revenue from my site he still does. Don’t use this plugin!

you mean he is evil?

and steals revenue?

how bad!!

i think its ilegal to put your ads as default, because most people are not technologicaly savyy

www.ads-software.com should review this plugin again

I have just found the same thing… this time not only with the adsense code, but with adding an ad in from Amazon… I don’t even subscribe to Amazon as a publisher!

Yeah this thing is total crap! It has inserted an ad (with his own code!) into my blog and I can’t get rid of it!!! This guy is a real a** h***! This plugin needs to be banned and removed from wordpress! DO NOT USE THIS PILE!

Is there a way that a person can lodge a formal complaint with WordPress? What would be the process for that? I have not even looked at their rules yet (shame on me). I think that is what I will do next and file a complaint with them.

Surely this kind of thing should not be allowed? I fully believe in donating (and do) for really good development to outright go and {steal} from someone else, because that is really what this comes down to, is quite another thing don’t you think?

I’ve installed the plugin and examined the code, and I can’t find where it’s doing anything malicious or unexplainable.

The configuration screen is indeed confusing, but all the options seem to work properly. When I tell it to suppress ads in certain parts of the page, those ads are suppressed, period.

When I disable the ad sharing, it seems to work. The randomizer code is correct, albeit convoluted. Everything is explained in the FAQ.

He does insert his own ads, but the text blocks there explicitly tell you that: “Please generate and paste your ad code here. If left empty, the default referral ads will be shown on your blog.“. The “Percentage of ad slots to share” option defaults to 5%, but it accepts and works properly with zero inserted there.

In short, this plugin does not appear evil to me.

Unless you can point out exactly what it’s doing that you think is malicious, I can’t see what the problem is. He’s not forcing anybody to use his ads, he only uses them as the default and it’s capable of turning that off. That doesn’t strike me as “illegal” or “evil” in any way.

Scratch that. I found some stuff and am investigating this plugin further.

Okay, it appears that many of his “default” ads are in fact Amazon ads. They’re not exactly the default ads I would have chosen, but they do have the advantage of being non-objectionable to pretty much everybody.

He also uses an interesting technique for holding this default data that I may use in the future as well. Definitely a good way of reducing space requirements.

However, that is still not necessarily malicious. Examining the insertion code shows that it still does obey the rules set forth on the setting screen. I have been unable to make it show an ad when I’ve set it not to do so.

There is room for improvement, I grant you. It won’t play nicely with WP-Super-Cache, which might cause his ads to come up on some pages all the time (since the ad got cached into the static page). That could be confusing to some people.

But still, I can’t find any obvious maliciousness here.

Hi Otto:

Thank you very much for investigating this, I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate it. I wonder though if you can blame that I still feel uneasy about the plugin.

I really don’t know about other people, but I have already started looking for another plugin specifically not designed (coded) by this developer.

I am sure that his intentions may have been honorable but then he should have made it a little more transparent to everyone and have kept in mind that newbies starting out for the very first time with WordPress as well as gurus would be using it.

With regard to the gurus, no problem. With regard to the newbies…serious problems if they don’t immediate have a clear picture of what to do and what will happen if they do certain things.

Once again, thank you very much for the time you have taken, I greatly appreciate it.

Kind Regards (and much appreciation),
S

I just noticed that this plugin sneaked some chitika ads into your articles also.

I found it by finding the username ch_client = “manojt”

Check out this google search to see how prevalent it is:

https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ch_client+%3D+%E2%80%9Cmanojt%E2%80%9D

I have disabled the plugin and I doubt that I will ever use it again. Too much hassle to try and figure out what goes where and why. Otto did investigate it… but then again, maybe there is a back-door (this one has my vote) somewhere that this guy is using without us knowing.

I suggest using a plugin that has been tried and tested by many other people and have actually been tested above and beyond! (Now, if I can just find a good one!) I know I work damn hard to get traffic to my site and for someone to just in essence [steal] the traffic that I am building through sweat and tears leaves me a little… leery of the plugin and as I mentioned more to avoid it completely.

You know what I find interesting reading all the comments here though is the fact that the developer has not once raised an objection or in any way made a statement where he denies doing what everyone is either suspecting or proving…and that my dear friends leads me to doubt that this piece of code is as innocent as is being claimed.

My webhost ASmallOrange actually posted this about the plugin a while ago:

Talk about frightening, we may have been the first to discover a security problem with the popular WordPress plugin Easy AdSenser (aka Easy AdSense!) Our elite Coding Ninjas have spied high volumes of maldet hits on confirmed-compromise sites with Easy AdSenser enabled. We strongly recommend that you avoid this plugin.

Not sure what the story is here – but I thought I’d share.