What's with the "pop ups" and colored text words

On the forums today?
Reading posts in the “General” forum today, and there are words in the text that will be a different color, and that are “double underscored”, ( make sense?), and SOMETIMES, when you hover over them, a “pop up” will appear.
The different colored text seem to function as a “hot link” as well.

Strange, I’ve never seen them on here, and no settings change on my computer or profile, to my knowledge.

It’s some sort of marketing spam thing that is looking over your shoulder and highlighting text that it can hotlink. Can’t recall the name of it, but you can uninstall it.

If antivirus software doesn’t get it, try Ad-Aware: http://www.lavasoft.com/

Funny, in your reply, the word “uninstall” was the affected word!

Looked in “My computer” under “add or remove” programs…Didn’t see anything there.

In the pop ups, it is called “Friends checker” or some crap like that.

Not computer savvy here!

Sorry, wish I could remember the name of the link generator. I use a program called “CCLeaner” to periodically check what’s loading at startup and found it there, then with the name could uninstall it. It might have been an IExplorer add-in now that I think about it. But it was easy to get rid of and hasn’t come back since, think it was installed with some other software and I just didn’t notice the checked box that allowed it to get in along with the program I wanted.

I used to get that same stuff and then my hard drive crashed after 7+ years. Recently, I put my two PCs together into one and started all over again. I had forgotten about the little buggers until I read your post.

You’ve got a browser hijacker of some sort. Get the free version of Malwarebytes here:

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

That has killed some nasty stuff on PCs I’ve worked on.

Got it gone for the present…I hovered over some of the colored text, and clicked on it’s “question” icon…The option was there to “opt out”, so I took it.

No idea where it came from!

EDIT: for BrewingRover…I have that already installed and working on my PC…Been using AND liking it’s work for a while!

What browser do you use?

Google Chrome is known for that.

[quote=“BrewingRover”]You’ve got a browser hijacker of some sort. Get the free version of Malwarebytes here:

http://www.malwarebytes.org/[/quote]That's the funny thing about the one that I had - malwarebytes and adaware didn't recognize it, maybe because it was an installed toolbar thing in IExplorer rather than actual malware (it thought it was just being helpful!).

[quote=“jabonneau86”]What browser do you use?

Google Chrome is known for that.[/quote]

Mozilla Firefox.