(To help with the misinformation below: we do not serve ads via Google. It is a large third party provider that directly deals with contacts such as Disney and the like. Google does all of its advertising in-house [from what I know], which is an entirely different system. Also, I have nothing to do with the ads on the site; literally 0% of it is decided by me at all. I am a developer, nothing more than that.)

I wish I could sympathise but most of us don't get those ads. Right now I'm getting LensCrafter, IBM and jewellry-related ads. I've occasionally seen the crappy sexualized anime Flash games as skin ads, but there's not too much I can do about those ones.

(EDIT: I rescind the statement about not being able to do much about it; I checked out the site for the ad in question and it seems that it is indeed not even remotely in the target audience that we specified. I've reported it to the ad provider.)

If you can grab the ad URL (inspect element and copy as much of the ad as you can) I can report it to the ad manager, but that's about it. We don't have a "remove bad ads" button. I wish we did, I wish I could just pick off ads that I knew were bad, but we can't. That's the crappy thing about third party ads.

The ads aren't managed by PMC; we didn't check a "show 18+ content" box. On the contrary, the ad manager knows what our target audience is and that's what they try to serve, but you have to understand that the ad company is a middle-man between hundreds, if not thousands, of those looking to provide ads. Mistakes happen, we report them and they don't stay around for very long. While I'm sure the ad provider does their best to verify that the ads are appropriate, my assumption is that ads sent to the provider are given fairly base information about the ad (data to use, company contact, target audience/age, geographical target, stuff like that) and it is trusted by the ad provider (unless it seems shifty I would imagine). With the amount of ads that get served, there's no doubt that we have to understand that this is just the way it is.

Could you imagine if the moderators had to personally review every single submission and forum post before they went live? It doesn't work like that. We can't physically do that. The process becomes bigger than the support; it has to be semi-automated.

So, the main point of the post from what I understand is "Yeah I totally made an inappropriate joke, so here's an unrelated scenario that happens without PMC's control that shows why I should be able to make this inappropriate joke.. but why not just let us make inappropriate jokes even though I fully acknowledge that that kind of content isn't suitable for the majority of our visitors?". In which case, my response is because common sense.

@MysteryOwner, I really don't appreciate you assuming that a) we/I ban people for not supporting things we/I do (especially not me, to imply that I personally violate some sort of basic common courtesy) b) that you make a biased claim about how I apparently am not informed on the things I discuss without providing proof as to how or why I am not informed, which should be a red flag to anybody reading that comment. If you can point us to an instance where I misinformed people, I will gladly edit the post to reflect the proper information. I have no problem admitting when I am wrong. I also don't know what "myself am a female" has to do with anything, whether to imply that men are inherently more involved in negative activities, but that's also a fairly sexist, biased statement that adds nothing here.

Now, I did provide a large explanation to Supernova, but all I did was explain several methods that could be used for ad targetting. I don't know what our ad provider uses, nor did I imply that our ad provider used any of those. I also don't know exactly what you're trying to imply about the ads; if they aren't based on IPs and cookies, what are they based off of then, in your opinion? They certainly aren't random, as I see very specific targetted ads all of the time (despite using AdBlock on most sites apart from this one). My IP changed very recently (when my brother came over a week ago), and I am seeing ads I have not seen in the 1 year of me having my prior IP. Yes, that's anecdotal evidence, but compared to "I always see these bad things and all of what you say is invalid", it's at least something that I can go off of, you know? It's a targetted, geographic system that is being applied to everybody. The providers down the chain don't have the information to determine the individual visitors' age, whether they are an admin/mod or not, female/male or not, or to embed ads just because of that. I can't explain how they do it because I don't work for them on their algorithms - all I can do is explain what I do know about ad management in an effort to educate people.

Did you not consider that maybe it is because your IP is constantly changing? You are sharing your IPs with possibly hundreds of individuals in your area, or even in neighboring areas/counties. If that information is being used for targetted ads, you are very rarely going to see information targetted from your machine. I, on the other hand, had a static IP for almost a year and was consistently seeing ads based on content I had recently, or even months ago, visited pages on. Dynamic IPs have a much higher miss rate for targetted ads if that information is being used.

^ Exactly what happens to me.