After reading a recent post on the Joomla.org Forum we were shocked to see that there are numerous opensource Joomla extensions that contain hidden advertising.

One example is JoomlaArt's Transmenu Extension. As pointed out in the original Forum Post many people who have installed JoomlaArt's Transmenu plugin are unaware that their website site has advertising embedded directly into their web site. A simple Google search shows the number of sites that carry hidden advertising for JoomlaArt's Transmenu plugin without the web site owners knowledge.

More extensions with hidden advertising:

• Smoothgallery: contains three hidden links, only one to the developer.
• Fireboard searchbot: it places an ad for the developer as the first result in all searches made on your site. There is no disclosure but there a small option inside the mambot to turn if off.

There is a full article available on this topic at Alledia.com.

As a commercial and professional extension we can assure our customers that the Vivid Content Extension does Not contain any form of hidden advertising or backlinks.