New link in a popup

I also noticed this new behaviour. It seems to be caused by class=”gofollow”. It causes ads to be popup blocked by most browsers, rather than opening in a new tab like they were doing before.

🙂 I’ve posted a separate question too before I noticed your post.
Just solved it temporarily with a hack, until the author gives us a proper solution.

Edit the plugin code and in adrotate-output.php comment out this part:

if(preg_match('/<a[^>]+class=\"(.+?)\"[^>]*>/i', $banner_output, $regs)) {
		    $result = explode(" ", $regs[1]);
		    $result[] = "gofollow";
		    $result = implode(" ", $result);
			$banner_output = preg_replace('/class=\"(.+?)\"/i', 'class="'.$result.'"', $banner_output);
		} else {
			$banner_output = str_replace('<a ', '<a class="gofollow" ', $banner_output);
		}

Make sure you comment out up to the right curly bracket.

Seems to have solve the issue for me, although it might be affecting clicktracking, so maybe the plugin author will give us a proper solution eventually.

I know it doesn’t make much sense. But I removed it and suddenly its working again normally. I know clicktracking will stop working, but the issue of adverts being blocked was much worse for me.

It could be that the javascript that is acting on links with the class gofollow is doing something that is causing browsers to open the links in a new window rather than a new tab.

I don’t know, but something definitely changed in one of the most recent releases because ads (the same ones, so nothing changed from that side) suddenly started behaving like this and getting blocked.

Well, Ads are blocked only if they open by themselves. If the user explicitly clicks on a link, the user wants that page to open. If this wasn’t like that even google’s revenue stream (Google Ads) would not work any more. I am sure its not the classname.

I did a bit of more research and I think I know the real cause of this.

In jquery.clicktracker.js there is this:

jQuery.ajax({ url: location.protocol + '//' + location.hostname + '/wp-content/plugins/adrotate/library/clicktracker.php', data: 'track='+track });
setTimeout(function() { window.open(href,(!target?"_self":target)); },300);

So what is happening is that, even if the user is explicitly clicking on the link, the popup is opening up 300ms afterwards, so the browser thinks its one of those annoying popups that come up automatically, ignoring the fact that the user clicked on it 300ms before, because they are separate events.

If you look at this here, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15818892/chrome-javascript-window-open-in-new-tab
Point 3 of the answer that was given seems to confirm this too.

Maybe what we just need is to invert the two, perform the normal window.open in the same event handler, and just perform the Ajax call with setTimeout

Just tried your code seems to work fine too. (My snippet above was OK too, but there is no need for a timeout).

The only pending issue is the track Id which is not being recognised by the clicktracker.php script.