How to isolate and unblock google text ad URLs?

November 14, 2006 11:51 AM

What specific URLs feed the google text ads on my webforum, so that I may unblock them in order to solve my 5 minute page load problems?

Ok, so basically I am running a website for my school. Our school's wireless network is heavily restricted in order to prevent students from accessing distracting sites during class. Having recognized the value of my site as a resource for students, our IT guy has unrestricted my sites URL.

The problem is, the site is currently hosted on a free webhosting service that uses google text ads. So the issue is that when students try to access the site, it attempts to fetch the ads from somewhere, and can't, so it hangs for about 3-5 minutes until it times out and loads the page without the ads.

I have isolated one of the urls, pagead2.googlesyndication.com, but I'm trying to figure out if there are more urls I should unblock in order to let the ads through and fix the slow load time issue.

I tried contacting the administrator of my hosting service but they refuse to give me any information. Also, I can't seem to locate a place where I can email google to receive a response.

Any ideas?

posted by lazaruslong to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I hope I don't get in trouble for self-linking here, but seeing as how my target demographic is my school and not the internets in general, and I think you may need to look at it in order to answer the question, here goes.

The site in question:

http://www.setbb.com/saenashville

The thread on setbb's tech support forum I started:

http://www.setbb.com/support/viewtopic.php?p=7105#7105
posted by lazaruslong at 11:54 AM on November 14, 2006

The administrator of the school's filtering software should be able to look at some sort of log to see what hosts your browser tries to contact when visiting a particular URL. Have you tried approaching the problem from that direction?
posted by jepler at 12:11 PM on November 14, 2006

That's a great idea.

The thing is, I started this site of my own volition, and the school has sort of seen the use and started integrating it into the program. But it's not a full fledged feature yet, and I guess I don't want to add to someone else's workload for fear of it being "more trouble than it's worth" and them shutting off the access. That coupled with the fact that the Admin is in New York City, and I have to go through two different levels of bureaucracy to get to him, makes it a little difficult.

However, all things considered, that might be the best route to take. I was hoping I could just have an email with a URL or list of URLs to be unblocked, minimizing the workload on the admin though.
posted by lazaruslong at 12:19 PM on November 14, 2006

I turned on the Tamper Data extension to Firefox and loaded your site. It only showed pagead2.googlesyndication.com for my one page load.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 12:48 PM on November 14, 2006

Make sure to ask him/her to unblock the whole googlesyndication.com domain, not just the pagead2 subdomain. Otherwise, every Google changes something, you'll have to nag them again.
posted by matthewr at 1:12 PM on November 14, 2006

In my experience only pagead2.googlesyndication.com serves text ads. You may also want to add this to your hosts file

127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com

Analytics has been known to lag. I've never had any lag issues with text ads.
posted by damn dirty ape at 2:53 PM on November 14, 2006