Mornning, everyone. We're still doing our best to sort this out but in the meantime, here's a bit more information which we hope might explain the situation better..
Mumsnet, as you probably know, is a free service and relies on ads. These ads are often served dynamically, based on users' interests or the page they are on at the time. Unfortunately, a small percentage of users are being served ads in an incorrect way, specifically on Desktop/Tablet and involving 'width to width' ads.
Although we supply the ads opportunities, we rely on buying tech to serve ads suited to the platform. These ads are meant for mobile environments, which means thhat instead of stretching width to width on a mobile device (no impact on viewing content) it stretches out of the Desktop side ads, covering the content.
We're currently working with an ad verification company that proactively blocks the majority of these issues, but there are still cases (like these) where they slip through certain routes and have an impact on user experience. When that happens, we reactively block ads based on URLs/advertiser name.
The manual process of finding the culprit and implementing blocks can be lengthy as we do not have a direct relationship with these advertisers. This is exacerbated due to having a small team that deals with this. However, we are looking at options to help speed up this process, change the setup and are hiring help to navigate these issues more effectively.
Unfortunately these are not quick fixes and for the moment we still rely on manual exclusions, so we still really appreciate as many details on the issues as possible from our users.