Idols-unlimited has enormous database of oriental movies, dramas, videos, animes and is one of my favorite sites for downloading Japanese drama. Having said that, there is one thing that I hate the most about this website; excessive advertisements (multiple popup-unders). I knew there are few softwares that will be able to sort out this problem, but I'm not really into using them and from my past experience there were always a small fraction of popups that managed to circumvent the popup blockers.In the quest of finding ways to manually block the popups I came across a useful website that teaches us on how to use HOST file to block ads, banners, 3rd party page counters, web bugs, and even most hijackers.
Before I go any further I will explain briefly what is host file. Why you need to explain this thing I hear you ask. The reason is I don't want you to be scared at the first glimpse of this thing. A friend of mine refused in the first place to use this method because he's afraid that it might damage the computer because the file is located in the windows system directory. Rest assured, it won't :)
What is host file anyway?
Host file is analogous to address book; resides in
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC (Windows XP)
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC (Windows Vista)
The "Hosts" file in Windows is used to associate host names with IP addresses. Host names are the www.yahoo.com addresses that you see every day whilst IP addresses are numbers which equivalent to the www words. Computers use the numbers (IP addresses) to actually find the sites, but we have words like www.yahoo.com so humans do not need to remember the long strings of numbers when they want to visit a site.
So, when you type in an address (e.g www.yahoo.com) into your browser, the Hosts file is consulted first to see if you have the "telephone number, i.e IP address" for that site. If you do, then your computer will "call it" and the site will be opened. If it does not exist, your computer will ask your ISP's (internet service provider) computer for the phone number before it can "call" that site. By default there is no address in your Host file because you have not put any there. Therefore, most of the time your computer asks for the IP address from your ISP to find sites.
Computers have a host address of their own and is known as the "localhost" address, with an IP address of 127.0.0.1 which it uses to refer to itself. If you associate another computer's host name with your localhost IP address, you have effectively blocked that host since all attempts to access it will lead back to you :) In summary, the host file simply redirects all the host names to the 127.0.0.1 (or any other ip address specified).
How to implement it?
By now, you should get a grip on how this thing works. In order to make it effective immediately you can key in the websites that has association to popups into the Host file but doing this manually will take ages as there are hundreds or thousands of them out there. Luckily, this page comes in handy as it offers the latest list of popup services (it is updated regularly). All you need to do is directly download this hosts.zip or you can go to MPVS website to download the file.
After that, you need to unzip the zip file, there are supposed to be 5 files in the folder.
You might want to go through the readme file, but at the end, all you need to do is double click the mvps.bat file. This action will effectively create the backup file (Hosts.mvp) and Host file will be overwritten with the popup services list.
If you were the publisher (Google, Kontera etc), you might want to remove them from the list, otherwise it will not appear at all in your browsers.
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