This post won’t mean anything to you unless your Portuguese, or live and speak Portuguese and have interest in the sporting life in Portugal.

** Pictures and Video after the break **

Some months ago, every time I wanted to read sports news online, I’d go straight to Record Online (I’m not even going to link them… keep reading to know why!).
Now that I’m away from my beloved country, I subscribed to some news feeds… well, I already had some, but not so many sports-related, since I’d always go for a “bica e ler o jornal” after lunch, and get my daily updates on soccer and sports news there. So I subscribed to Record’s feed on my favorite team (Sporting Clube de Portugal for those who are wondering :p). So yesterday, as I was reading the feeds, a specific one caught my attention and so I proceed to read the full article. I always open a bunch of tabs in the background as I read the feeds, and go back to them after I collected a few to read. To my surprise, my Safari window resized, and showed a pop-up: one of those “You’ve been infected with Virus and Spyware!!” (it included a pseudo-progress bar, like it was actually checking my computer!) For Pete’s sake, a Windows-only app running on my… OS X?? Yeah, sure, I’m gonna buy that now!! WOW

Than the page I go to the page of the article: nothing but the side columns, header and footer… no real content there!! Record’s new website (I don’t know how old it is… just noticed it now) is not only b0rked with spyware fake ads, like the ones you’d expect from pr0n or piracy-related websites (even the “big” ones are more careful to what kind of ads get there!) .

And the design… Oh God!!! Did they pay for that crap??

And thinking Record is one of the best sellers in sports newspapers… I for one will not buy a single issue again when I go back to Portugal, I’ll unsubscribe to it’s feed immediately and recommend everyone to do the same! UNACCEPTABLE!

PS: For those wondering, I do have Safari 3.0 with popup block activated and even SafariBlock which is an “AdBlock”-like plugin that works great! And I did try the same website with WebKit, just to see if the content would appear. And with Firefox, then content does show up, but also do the popup ads…

PS2: If you think “Oh, I have AdBlock+ and I’m not getting those ads or popups” you should consider that most people are using Internet Explorer with no ad blocking system installed, and might just believe the “story” does ads present them!

Like I said: U.N.A.C.C.E.P.T.A.B.L.E

PS: I made a little video to show how the page looks in Safari, and took some snapshots of the “ads” that pop’ed up! Click “More” to see them!