Ok, in this section we're going to learn about the hosts file on your computer which is what we're going to use to block the utopia ingame (and the geocities) pop-up/banner/the banner in SwirveMail/and utopia public forum ads. What hosts does is allows you to assign certain IP's to certain address's. So we assign windows default return IP to the main ad address's Utopia uses. This way when you reach a page which tries to get an ad to load it will look for the ad in the wrong place and since it can't find it the ad will not work. Now what we need to do is find your hosts file so you can move on to the next section and add the correct lines to it to remove the ads. Where it is will depend on your version of windows (note: I have yet to get this to work on ME (I've tried on three different computers) or 98 SE (I've only tried it on here once), but if you're on one of these systems try anyways. I'm not convinced it doesn't work yet on ME or 98 SE yet). It will be in one of the following folders depending on your system-
If you have windows 95, windows 98 or windows ME your hosts file will be in the c:\windows folder.
If you have windows NT, windows 2000, or windows XP pro your hosts file will be in the c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc folder.
If you have windows XP home your hosts file will be in the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc folder.
To get to this folder click on your start menu and press run. Enter in run the folder and press OK. In the folder you will need to look for the file called hosts. There will also be a file called hosts.sam, this is NOT the file you want. You want the file called plain hosts and no extension. When you find it double click it and it tell it to open using notepad (but make sure the "always open it this way" box is not clicked). When open it should look something like this-
# Copyright (c) 1998 Microsoft Corp.
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP stack for Windows98
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
# For example:
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
127.0.0.1 localhost
The way you ad things like for example 127.0.0.1 AdAddress is to put it under the local host one like a list, for example-
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 AdAddress
127.0.0.1 AdAddress2
If you could not find your hosts file we will have it on the site for you to download later. But for now if you did find the hosts file you know how to excess it AND how to add address's to it. You're ready to go to the next section of the site!