Miscellaneous Tricks

Time-delay Redirect Hijack

Ever been at a particular site, gone to another window, then on return found yourself at a completely different site? It is simple for a spammer to redirect you to another site (usually one that pays him a penny for the redirect) after a time delay or after a period of user inactivity (i.e no mouse clicks detected in the window). Disabling Java scripting will prevent 'no-activity' redirects but it WON'T prevent ALL timed redirects - it pays to watch your address bar.

MouseOver and Right-Click Tricks

Again, these are methods used by the truly desperate of penny-collecting spammers. The MouseOver involves redirecting you or opening a new window when you bring the mouse cursor above a link or picture, without even needing a click! The Right-click trick involves the spammer using Java script to reprogram your mouse so that instead of bringing up the normal gray menu you are hit with a redirect or pop-up.

Back Key Hijacking

Otherwise known as mouse-trapping and sometimes (probably incorrectly) called circle-jerking, this involves altering the browser window's use of the Back function so that clicking the Back icon or pressing the backspace key simply reloads the same page. The idea is to trap you at the spammer's page while increasing his hit count, which the extra-sleazy of the spammer brigade use to move up in popularity lists (toplists).



Hit-and-Run Pop-ups

This type of pop-up once opened immediately minimizes itself, so that if you're not paying attention (or have a super-fast computer) you don't notice it until later, by which time it's had enough time to completely load its graphics and other junk.



Circle Jerking

This sleazy technique involves promising the surfer free movies or pictures by clicking on links. However this does nothing more than open another window full of links (usually in the form of so-called 'toplists') which again promise the same. The end result is that the surfer simply goes around in circles, gaining nothing with each click except helping the spammer(s) to pennies and nickels via all the instant and exit pop-ups and redirects that these trash links load with each new window.

Disabling Java scripting will prevent most of the tricks described on this page. See the section 'A simple way to protect yourself' at the main menu for details on how to do this.