Hey there, guys.

I'm one of the developers behind PlanetMinecraft. I hope this post isn't against the rules of redirects/ad links, but this is more about the concept itself and less about us trying to advertise.

We take ads seriously at PMC. We've always been against certain advertising tactics (we have rules against forced paywalls, for instance, as well as other rules to prevent commercial advertising using our systems). While yes, like most sites we've had our fair share of malicious ads, we do consume all of your reports about ads and we forward them to our ad provider who handles them all. We'll never force our users to see ads, and obviously our ultimate goal is to have everybody not require adblock and to have a safe environment there.. but sadly page ads have devolved over the years into memory-eating Flash applets or incredibly terribly programmed JS code that locks the page.

I've noticed a really crazy trend through; ad link services, such as adf.ly and adfoc.us have been huge in Minecraft's community. Honestly, I think Minecraft may have been the reason for these systems to pop up and thrive, which is crazy. We've generally always allowed adf.ly and similar services for download links for content that people make, because we do agree that content creators should be credited properly for their creations and compensation for making free stuff is always nice, especially if the don't have a job.

My main concern though is that these services have gone way too far, in my opinion. They are continuously avoiding ad blockers, forcefully redirecting you to ads even that they must have hardcoded or something, and even providing malicious content directly to people.. and it doesn't seem like they are listening to reports about it either.

I'm not sure what to do about this. We shouldn't be standing around letting these places do this, but at the same time so many people rely on these services for small amounts of extra income to help them continue creating stuff. What -can- we do to prevent this from becoming a bigger problem than it already is?

I posted a poll on our Twitter account, offering your vote may help us figure it out: https://twitter.com/PlanetMinecraft/status/730960028388065280

If you've got any opinions or paths you think we as a community (and I don't just mean PMC, but other sites like MCF that also allow these links) could take to help the content creators find better, less malicious services, that'd be awesome!