A few more ads...

[Mike]

Just a heads up - you may see a few more ads throughout the site than just what you've been used to seeing in the header. This is a recent change we made to allow Google Adsense to place ads "optimally" on the site. We're still trying to keep a clean look (unlike a lot of other forums), so hopefully this is not too intrusive.

For transparency - the forum makes a couple hundred dollars per year from showing ads. This only covers a small portion of the hosting, forum software, etc. costs (not including time). Allowing a few more ads on the site (from the few days we have so far) seems like it will offset the costs a bit more. After costs are subtracted from ad revenue, the site has always lost money since day one. I'm the owner/admin of the site and fund the whole thing myself and I have my second kid on the way, so that extra offset will be helpful.

@holtneil and @GJH105775 help mod the forum as volunteers. Without them, I wouldn't be able to keep up, so I want to formally thank them as well for everything they do as well!

So hopefully the few more ads are relevant and don't bother you guys too much =)

Let me know if you have any questions or if the ads are too bothersome.

*If you see spammy posts please report them still. These aren't sponsored unless me or one of the mods make an announcement saying they are sponsored and/or okay to post.

 

[Mike]

FYI - I turned down the ads. I had set automatic ads from Google and overtime they added more and more stuff. I will continue to monitor and I will crank down the number of ads even more if it's too much. Things should be a bit more usable now. No pop ups or pop overs as far as I can tell from the new settings I chose.

Thanks!

Mike

 

[holtneil]

Hi Mike it looks good to me

 

[pineapple]

Advertising is very annoying, but to better development of the website, the support of advertising costs is essential, if you can standardize advertising is good.

 

[Mike]

Advertising is very annoying, but to better development of the website, the support of advertising costs is essential, if you can standardize advertising is good.

Definitely. I hate forums that are covered in advertising. I am trying to balance some advertising to help with the hosting fees without overdoing it. Sometimes it's hard these days because a lot of the ad placement is dynamic. I used to have to manually place the ad code in the templates. Now it's more of a knob to turn the ads up or down - but there were also some other "features" that were enabled automatically that placed even more ads. I tuned it quite a bit in the past week to lower the amount of ads, so it should be a lot better now!