Remove Advertisements from Hardwarezone

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Forums sites such as Hardwarezone.com have been trying to monetise their page views by inserting advertisements into their pages. While a few well placed banners do no real harm, Hardwarezone.com advertisement banners have been putting more and more adverts onto their pages.

When the Hardwarezone adverts started, there were only banners. Then it evolved to the so-called Catfish, " an ingenious ad unit that is subtle in execution and delivers click-through rate many times above the industry average of 0.2%.", which appeared at the bottom of the page on first load. Gradually, Hardwarezone started putting adverts after the first postings of forum threads. That is already a lot of advertisements floating on a page!

The final straw is perhaps implementing floating advertisements that open right in the middle of the screen!!

3 ways to get rid of advertisements on Hardwarezone pages
  1. The simplest way is to pay money and subscribe to DMClub, Hardware Zone's premier membership club. The deluxe membership provides DMClub members access the forums through a dedicated server so loading speeds are much faster and also an advert free experience.
  2. The slightly more complicated way is to install an alternative browser such as Firefox and put in plugins such as ad blocker, ad block plus and ad block plus element and configure the plugins to filter out the advertisements that you do not want to see.
  3. The "most complicated" and cleanest approach to remove the Hardwarezone advertisements is to manipulate your hosts file if you are on a Windows system.

    Look for the hosts file on your system at the location C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and open it with notepad and add the following lines to the file (make a copy of the file in case you need to revert to the original setup).

    # [Hardwarezone]
    127.0.0.1 streamit.hardwarezone.com
    127.0.0.1 streamit2.hardwarezone.com
    127.0.0.1 hardwarezone.us.intellitxt.com
    127.0.0.1 pageadsyndication.google.com
    127.0.0.1 *.googlesyndication.com
    127.0.0.1 kona.kontera.com
    127.0.0.1 *.kontera.com
    127.0.0.1 ad.hk.doubleclick.net

    Save the file and restart your browser and you should be able to now enjoy a relatively advertisement free experience on Hardwarezone.

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