Why do pop-up ads sometimes come up when I am browsing your site?

We don't have any ads on Desiring God other than for our own resources (and even those are sparse). What you are seeing is from something called "Spyware" that you have installed (most likely inadvertantly) on your computer. The software is installed in many different ways (such as accidently clicking "OK" on many websites), and comes bundled with some software.

What Spyware basically does is collect information about you and send it to others, and tries to make money off of this information in every way possible. Some even harvest your address book for emails and send out spam in your name. The bottom line is that you may have an infected computer that is displaying ads and doing other things to make someone money, even on sites that don't have ads. We suggest using proven removal tools such as Ad-aware and Spybot Search & Destroy (both have free versions).

Often it takes running both software packages to remove all the spyware from computers. If running the removal tools does not remove all the spyware, you may have to call a professional to remove the remaining spyware.