Website Dandruff: Ditching "Intellitxt" Contextual Popups

I used to put up with those scripts that automatically highlight words on a webpage and then attach pop-up ads to them. You could tell which ones they are (not counting the pause before the web page paints) because they usually have a distinctive marking -- most often it's a green double-underline.

And, whenever your mouse cursor gets within an eyelash of the green line, an ad pops open on your screen. No more.

It used to be that the ads were just text and they were few and far between. But they're getting more aggressive, it seems, and now I've started seeing self-starting video in them. A line has been crossed.

The number of links per infected page has been growing and sometimes you can just feel the web browser grinding to a halt while the Intellitxt script scans and processes the page.

But the videos are virtual straw that tipped the scale, broke the camel's back, stepped over the line. 

When Intellitxt decided that it could make me wait for   Enough! Intellitxt is now and forever banned from my browsers.

It was easy to do, so I'll pass it on to you here.

I'm showing only the Windows XP dialogs here, but the concept and the technique is quite similar in both Mac OS-X and even in Vista -- just find your internet security &/or firewall preferences for the OS and follow the directions to block a wildcard URL.

In your OS's internet security settings find the tab, button or section where you can "block" or "restrict" sites. In the Windows XP dialog, click the "Restricted Sites" icon, then click the "Sites" button to add a restricted site.

In the next dialog box you'll have a list of sites that you've already blocked or restricted (if any) and a field for adding more.

In the field for adding a restricted site, type *.intellitxt.com. Be sure to include the asterix-dot at the beginning. That tells the site/URL filter to block anything in the intellitxt.com domain. They put lots of variations on the front, so this is important. (If you're using OSX or Vista, it's probably the same but check the "help" to be sure.)

In this box, in Windows XP, you need to click the "Add" button after you type in the wildcard+URL. If you're using a different system, then click "Ok" or "close" or "Save options" or whatever you need to click to save the new restricted URL.

Then "close" or "OK" your way out of there and "Refresh" or "Reload" the web page that you were on. It should come up with no (zero) Intellitxt links on it. 

Intellitxt should provide a way to opt out of ever allowing their script to run. But that would be in a perfect world.