Advertlets.com, Malaysia’s second blog advertising network is currently offline from the net due to domain issues.

All Adverlets’s publishers serving its ads will face some issues with their advertlets’s ads. When a visitor tries to open a site containing the Advertlets’s ad, the site will be directed to a landing/parking page with the url http://www.adbaaz.com/?dn=apps.advertlets.com&flrdr=yes&nxte=……….. (see screen shot below)

Some Malaysian sites in the blogsphere have suspected that Advertlet.com was hacked, however a quick check revealed that the domain, www.advertlets.com has expired on 3 January 2008. Further checking revealed that www.advertlets.com was renewed on 3 January 2008 itself but it was officially updated on 4 January 2008. Below is the snapshot of www.advertlets.com during the time of writing this article.

A quick response from Josh Lim, founder of Advertlets, on his blog revealed that the ad network was down due to the DNS changes made. Below are the answers of Josh Lim regarding the current issues.

Is Advertlets.com shutting down?
No. We’ll be back online shortly.

What happened?
A complication regarding the renewal process of the domain for Advertlets.com. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Will Advertlets.com be online at the same URL again?
Yes, it will be at the same url, www.advertlets.com

Can you make sure that this won’t happen in future?
Please be assured that this will never happen again, and we will take all steps necessary.

Why is my blog redirecting?
Due to the nature of the error, some if not all blogs are redirecting to a placeholder site. This is not intended, and usual service will resume shortly.

How soon until the error is resolved?
For most, the error should be resolved within an hour from time of posting. Worst case (for international users), 24 hours.

Can I still check out my account details or access Advertlets.com?
Yes, you can use http://apps.advertlets.com (this is the beta login for Advertlets 2.0 and is mostly functional). Subdomains for advertlets.com are still functional, however, the main www.advertlets.com domain is affected.

Or, you can edit your hosts file: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (no file extension). Open up the file in notepad and put in this line:
202.46.116.100 advertlets.com

(Note that this is only a temporary fix)

Does this affect my current cashouts?
No, payments will be sent as usual.

The ad code was so powerful that it even diverted Google cached page of www.advertlets.com to the domain parking page, view here. Other resolution on top of Josh’s suggestion is to remove the advertlets code on your site temporarily until these issues are resolved.

Lets hope that after this, the Advertlets’s ad network will load faster!!!!

Here are some earlier site that reported this issue:

• Advertlets Domain Already Expired?
• Advertlets kena godam (Hack)?
• O Advertlets, Advertlets, wherefore art thou Advertlets?
• Adverlets being hacked!
• My blog redirected to other site automated! hacked?
• Advertlets Domain Expired

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