I agree that Spiceworks’s ads don’t suck, and I whitelist them for that reason. But if I were blocking the ads, how exactly would I see this one prompting me to whitelist the site?

Is this some kind of intentional irony?
7 Spice ups
kelly
(Sosipater)
2
That’s better than the guy who took someone else’s laundry out at the laundromat. He had unintentional ironing.
2 Spice ups
jackie
(Jackie (Spiceworks))
3
I can’t explain this eloquently, because I can’t recall all the workings behind the scenes. The basic gist is that we do have the ability to serve ads from ourselves - from our own domain versus a “real” ad server. This means we can deliver house ads that way, which will bypass the whitelists since you allow our domain in order to access the Community. We couldn’t do this for all ads, but these are special, as you have seen :-).
Jackie.
4 Spice ups
Ah, so these ones are ads that aren’t really ads. That makes sense!