Pop Ups No More!

About 2 weeks ago, I received a message from a co blogger informing me about the pop ups that appeared when she visited my site "one being a normal pop up, the other was something that was really offensive, it was for a porn site". I was alarmed by this message because I am not aware of those pop ups. I have a pop up blocker that's why I don't see any whenever I view my blog and it was only when I disabled my blocker that I was able to see them. At that moment I panicked, because I don't know how I got them and don't wanna offend my readers by pop ups that links to any porn site.

So what did I do?

First, I removed the most recent HTML I have encoded in my sidebar but didn't work.
Second, I made a post asking for Help!and I found out that I'm not the only one who has the same problem.
Third, I asked help from a reliable friend, Joliber and he didn't fail me. Immediately he posted an entry about Blogger.com Malware Attacks | Move or Be Deleted in the Blogosphere. According to him, it's a serious problem that needs to be addressed that's why he searched the Internet to get at least a close hypothesis regarding the root of this trouble and fortunately, he found this post under the Log in Issues of Blogger Help Group.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fine bloggers, There has been a decent amount of chatter recently from people who are concerned about losing access to their blogs due to a malware Terms of
Service violation. While this is admittedly an imperfect system at the
moment, please understand that all of these efforts are in place with
the best of intentions. Malware is a very serious issue and our standards have to err a bit on the side of caution for the sake of securing our users and our
service. It’s nothing personal we promise.

That being said, and after putting a good amount of thought into the
issue, we think it is only fair to give everyone a chance to clean up
their blogs. So here is the plan that we have come up with:

Step 1: Locate and remove malware from your template

My guess is that many of you folks have either custom templates or
third party gadgets, and the malware is somewhere within that code
that you copy and pasted into your template. -Open up the Html editor from either the Template | Edit Html or
Layout | Edit Html tab. -Select ‘Expand Widgets Templates’ to show all of the code. -Now comes the tricky part of pulling out the nefarious code.
Oftentimes, it is located at the bottom of the page so starting from
the bottom is a good idea. Look for things like script and iframe
tags that link out to third party URLs, stat counters, as well as
third-party javascript elements. Remove these items from your template
and then make sure to save it afterwards.

Step 2: Submit your cleaned up URL into the appeal form below:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pZHHZdeYKeHgXlmtdMIRfbw&…

Step 3: Within 48 hours we will review your submission and, if it is
free of malware, go ahead and restore your blog. I will post a list of
restored URLs every other day at the following link: http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help/web/restored-urls-from-ma…

This list is also located within the ‘Resources’ Section of the
Blogger Help Group. If you do not see your link after 48 hours, then you can assume that
the malware was not removed. You may then repeat the process and re-
submit, if you wish. Thanks for hanging in there everyone, -Gatsby

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I did these steps and found no scripts nor iframe in my template so that means it's not the cause of my pop ups. Joliber again informed me that there were reports that it is caused by rank widgets. So I tried to delete it and the pop ups indeed disappeared. I have submitted my URL and has been restored and verified as free of malware. I am now sharing with you this information because I know some of you are also having this problem. I hope this will help you.

***Some reports also says that 3rd party widgets like site counters, traffic feeds and popular pages may cause unwanted pop ups.

More infos can be read at
http://mapiles.com/2008/03/17/bloggercom-user-a-must-read-for-all-of-you/