So I'm not too bothered about the adverts that have plagued the forums recently, personally I don't notice them much. However, today I noticed an advert for an animal charity, you know the type, using upsetting and often disturbing pictures of animals in distress to stir up emotion and help them to gain donations.

Now, I'm all for these charities, the work they do is admirable. However, this game and forum is supposed to be suitable for a young audience. I even recieved a 7 day ban for a forum thread which referred to a news article of a sexual nature relating to WoW (yes, something reported on the BBC news at 6pm on television).

Personally I dislike seeing these advertisements as I have done work with animal charities in the past and seeing these images is quite upsetting to me, and I do not feel they should be up here. Perhaps replace them with banner adverts for the same organization which doesn't involve such provocative imagery, I do not know the solution, but I feel these are not suitable for WoW forums.

Thank you.

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Q u o t e:
So I'm not too bothered about the adverts that have plagued the forums recently, personally I don't notice them much. However, today I noticed an advert for an animal charity, you know the type, using upsetting and often disturbing pictures of animals in distress to stir up emotion and help them to gain donations.

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Do you have a screenshot of these ads?

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Community Team - English
"Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months." - Clifford Stoll

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Q u o t e:
Just had to refresh the page twice to get the animal abuse ad:

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h12/Kurosaki_photos/animalad.jpg

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Thank you. We'll make sure to bring up the concerns with this one.

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Q u o t e:
Wryxian has posted that only WOW ads are meant to appear and then was forced to take that back when it was clear a policy change had occured without actually informing the CMs here (bad form to treat you guys and girls that way IMHO).

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Jumping to the conclusion that we were not informed is unfair to both the community team and the rest of Blizzard. This was a simple misunderstanding, and not lack of (or faulty) information, and we apologise for the initial confusion on the matter.

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Q u o t e:
Thundgot is asking for players to submit screenies, can he not see the ads himself?/quote]
As demonstrated by above links, ads vary per location. While we can definitely start digging through ads available in each region/country, it's much easier if people provide a screenshot right away. :)

[quote]Who vetted them and approved them for display here? Is anyone vetting them or is adbureau functioning by itself without referring back to Blizzard EU? Given that adbureau has already allowed a gold seller ad to slip through the net, I find the idea that no one in Blizz appears to have a weather eye set firmly on ad content BEFORE it appears here to be most alarming.

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Again this looks like jumping to conclusions, using a specific accident/incident to indicate there's no control. There are guidelines and agreements in place, but we're of course keeping an eye on things, and greatly value constructive voicing of concerns and feedback.

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Q u o t e:
The one on the right is from a dutch internet company.

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I meant of the one I quoted. ;)

Closing this as the concern brought up in the first post has been addressed and we'll follow up on that. For the remaining discussion there are already a few other threads.

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Community Team - English
"Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months." - Clifford Stoll