athloi's Journal: Snopes replies to adware allegations

Seeing the article on how Snopes.com has been serving adware, I wrote in to the site with a question: is this an urban legend?

Here's the Snopes reply:

Thank you for inquiring about the possibility an
advertisement that violates our acceptable advertising guidelines at
http://www.snopes.com/info/faq.asp#ads may have been displaying to
some visitors to our site.

We have temporarily removed from our site *all* advertisements from
the agency that handles the ad in question while we investigate if and
how such an ad was indeed being served to some of our
visitors.

We don't ever knowingly run adware or malware on our site -- that's
not who we are or who we'd ever want to be.

Urban Legends Reference Pages --> http://www.snopes.com

While it's always nice to get a reply, and they're doing the right thing, I find it hard to believe anyone would look at those ads and not realize that they're up to no good.

I'm also ambivalent about snopes.com itself. While I think it's funny, it often oversimplifies issues and in some cases is flat-out wrong. There's rarely an attempt to find the fragments of truth in some urban memes, only a smug shooting down that leaves the reader less not more informed.

It remains an excellent resource for true urban legends of the "Bill Gates will give you $100 for this email." No word on whether they've updated the urban legend about waking up on ice with your kidneys cut out.