For those curious, this is the plugin in question:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/infolinks-officlial-plugin/
Nearly a 5 star rating and 10,000+ active installs.
One would think it could be trusted…. but…
Any program that continues to run it’s script after I “deactivate” the plugin in my admin control panel, is a bad, malicious program.
I deactivated the plugin from my wordpress site, as well as logged into my InfoLinks dashboard, disabled each one of the different ads I had enabled such as in text ads, in fold ads, etc, and still kept getting ads that covered, obscured, and hid my content.
Not only that, but I got popup and popunder ads, or ads which forced open new tabs taking the readers away from my blog.
The only way I finally found to get rid of the ads was to delete the plugin completely, which seems so far / knock on wood / to have solved the problem. Deactivating the plugin should disable the ads, period. It’s very suspicious behavior that it doesn’t turn off the ads when deactivating both the wordpress plugin AND logging into my infolinks account and disabling every ad type.
Infolinks may be good for some websites and some audiences, but it was a bad fit for my website, and I would think that by “deactivating” the plugin from within wordpress and also logging into my infolinks dashboard, and turning off each of the different ad units, that would stop the ads.
I am not the only user experiencing this issue. And Infolinks knows of the issue but refuses to fix their plugin. For over 3 years now. Some users reported that the plugin made modifications to their header and/or footer files – I checked every one of my theme files and did not see “infolinks” anywhere, but it could be calling itself something else, as they are “wise” to the fact that people will be checking those file locations now for removing the plugin.
Here are just some of the people experiencing the same issue.
See below:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/remove-infolinks-from-wp-site
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-remove-infolinks-ads
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-remove-infolinks-from-my-website
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/infolinks-on-and-off
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/719142-removie-infolinks.html
Why does this plugin exist? How has it been rooting itself inside wordpress websites for nearly 4 years and wordpress does nothing to remove the plugin from the official wordpress site of plugins?
Why are there so few negative reviews on the plugin page itself.
Webmasters BEWARE!!!!!!!
I want you all to know that I try very hard to maintain a clean, easy to use, east to navigate website, because I am not trying to sell you anything, I am hoping you’ll stay and read my reviews, and maybe decide to comment if you like something, and do this just because of my passion for the hobby. I do monetize my site with ads. I am lucky if I get a check once a year, which doesn’t even begin to cover the costs of maintaining the site. But that doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me, is connecting with other geeks and gamers, and building a community and making friends. That’s why I love blogging.
I am very unhappy with how Infolinks looks and how it degrades the user experience. From your standpoint as a user. I don’t care if I could turn a profit with it. It was ugly, and distracting from my site content, and presented unrelated, and even sometimes yet misleading advertisements, telling users they had to install software to view content on my site etc which was a lie. They basically advertise and sell only malware products, where if a user on my site were to click an infolinks ad, they’d probably be getting some software riddled with spyware and malware.
That is why I decided to remove Infolinks. and why I would encourage other
I want you to know that I have tried to remove Infolinks from my site and will continue to monitor and work to resolve the issue if it is in fact not yet removed fully.
Once again, if you are a web admin, please avoid Infolinks at all costs!