When I was an unsupervised 13-year-old on the internet, I did things I certainly should not have been doing. It could have been much worse, but through an obsessive interest in Bleach and a series of mods who thought I was very precocious and trusted me with mod privileges, I somehow got promoted to admin a fairly popular play-by-post rpg. I did this for about six years before interest in Bleach died down. Then I discovered TTRPGs and pivoted.

But until The Adventure Zone kindled an obsession with DnD, I wrote guides for new players, revised our leveling system, approved homebrew and new player characters, GMed site-wide storylines, and made custom forum skins.

We hosted our site on the free version of ProBoards, which miraculously still functions almost 20 years later. Unfortunately, it seems like they’re still running into the same crisis that nearly killed our site back then.

“I got the Vistus :(“

The transition from Windows XP to Windows Vista was a mess to my 13-year-old self. RPG Maker XP was not backwards compatible with Vista (wtihout some workaround that I didn’t have the funds or the know-how to set up, anyway), so my side project stopped being viable on my shiny new laptop.

Also, it felt like every other week I was running into another virus. My parents liked to blame this on gaming websites – anything with a Flash plugin was suspect, and clearly, Neopets was responsible for any slow computing.

One day, I turned on my computer to a black screen with a single pop up from Vista Security, telling me that I had a virus. In reality, Vista Security is itself a virus.

Everyone on our roleplay forum knew that this type of popup was fishy, so when we finally managed to get back on the site to chat with each other, we said, “Man, I got the Vistus too. :(“

The 13-Year-Old Blue Teamers

Our blue team consisted entirely of our mods, which consisted of me, the other 14-year-old moderator, and Raven, a 20-something who inexplicably hung around and quietly banned anyone who acted inappropriately towards the tweenage staff long after she stopped participating in the RP.

At the time, Raven still held the admin credentials, and she contacted ProBoards to report the issue. As the only Mac user in our group, she was mercifully unaffected, a fact which she gleefully touted whenever she hopped onto the chat.

It turned out that some of the banner ads on ProBoards carried malware. This was a widespread issue in 2010-ish, but in our small world we were mostly concerned about ProBoards. (I encountered it on ProBoards before I encountered it on Deviantart, and felt quite smug about being unaffected there.)

The rest of us had to figure out how to remove the virus, and our best solution involved installing Malwarebytes, disconnecting from the internet, and running a scan offline. We then instructed all of our users to do the same, and, once their PC was cleared, download Adblock. (At the time, Adblock worked properly.)

With everyone’s computers cleared and protected, we resumed business as usual and never uninstalled adblocker.

This was not the only security issue we ran into running this site, but it was the most widespread. We also ran into a concern about a former admin returning and drunkenly implying that he would destroy the site, which prompted us all to change our passwords just in case he wasn’t bluffing before we unceremoniously banned him. Nothing ever came of it, possibly because we erred on the side of caution, possibly because he was just being weird and drunk and liked to troll people.

15 Years Later

To this day, I refuse to uninstall my adblocker. If a website requires me to disable my adblocker, I would rather leave the website. I have been properly traumatized into running regular virus scans, though my go-tos from the time have suffered from overly aggressive ads that attempt to harangue free users into buying the premium version (cough, Avast, cough).

I remained skeptical of any and all ads, which is rather unfortunate because ad revenue is a major way that my favorite creators got paid for blogging or putting out webcomics week to week. I felt like a freeloader whenever I’d see a post pleading for ad clicks, noting that this was the only way they got paid. But honestly, the .01 cents the creator might get from my ad click wasn’t worth my security to me.

I don’t have much of a solution. Admins don’t necessarily control what ads appear on their sites, and it’s on the ad tech companies and CDNs to ensure that ads are appropriate and safe. It just takes one slip up to risk everyone’s PII and passwords, so until they can get it together, I’d rather stay overly cautious. I doubt that ProBoards (which appears to have continued having these issues into the 2020’s) would get me a new computer if a virus from an ad they hosted bricked my PC.

Anyway, highly recommend installing UBlock Origin. It’s the single most effective antivirus protection I’ve ever installed.