The Google AdSense Terms of Service warn against clicking on ads on your own site. Google AdSense Program Policies

Please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason is prohibited, to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs.

However, sometimes I can’t stop myself, I forget I’m on my own site, and just want to click them so much. (Too bad the other viewers of my sites are not so excited, otherwise I’d have retired) It’s even worse if I’m looking at one of my sites on my kids computer, someday I’ll forget to close the browser window, and a kid will illegaly click me out of AdSense, no more commissions, no more money.

So I’m pleased that someone came up with a great solution - it’s for FireFox only, but why would you use any other browser?

Prevent accidental clicks on your own AdSense ads

This is an addon to Greasemonkey, so if you need that, install it first.

Once installed, it will require you to entire your AdSense ID, so it will only blog your own ads.Remember to install it on all the computer at work or home (and laptops also) that anyone can use to access your sites. Google is pretty smart and it will track you down - and saying my friedn at work clicked my ads by mistake won’t get you back in the loop.

Ever since the otmaker problems of last month, it seems a good idea to do more comprehensive checking. I’ve had good advice to run the Ewido trojan scanner. However, someone forgot to tell me it won’t run in WIndows 98, so I have to reboot into Windows XP.

It finds a massive number of traffic cookies, it used to be I would just ignore these as harmless, but now I’m on a kill for everything stealing system resources. So that’s 207 traffic cookies removed. In total it removed over 700 cookies and useless junk.

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space.

Running this can find some very strange things. I found file extensions (which should be typically .com .exe .html) as complete sentences of meaningfull text. Either this was random registry corruption, or software installations gone bad.

Ended up removing 238 meg of assorted junk.