I am displeased with banner ads on a paid forum. If this is not temporary, I will be more displeased. Google ads, I can deal with, for the good of the board.
If this is permanent, I would like some darn good numbers explaining why we have to put up with this ‘feature’, and what good it will do the members of the board. I don’t bitch about much, but I am not pleased with this at all.
If, contrawise, it is a precursor to eliminating the member fee, I am for it. I feel the board was better before it went pay. Well. Not the infrastructure of the board, of course.
If it is a necessary and temporary evil needed to raise money to upgrade the board? I will suffer.
If it is permanent? Well, re-upping isn’t so far away. I may take my hat and go. Perhaps one more year, but… not more than that.
Oh,yeah. Add avatars, I am gone. This is a library. Quiet in the library. Flashy things are bad. Avatars are double plus ungood.
Y’know, Tuba, I’ve defended the thankless job the mods and admins do with enough frequency to be repeatedly accused of ass-kissing. But not every inquiry is a complaint and not every complaint is automatically unfounded, so there really isn’t any need for you to be so goddamned snarky.
I’ll just note that the only reason the ad bothers me is because it’s placed somewhat oddly. I think it would look better if it was on the right side of the blue and red Straight Dope banner rather than sitting in its own space. (Of course this might not work depending on screen resolution.)
I strongly agree with this, unless there’s an option to disable avatars for an account. I access this board through dial-up occasionally- avatars would double or triple load times for me. But if there’s a turn-off option, who cares?
So far all but one of the ads has veen all Flash, and I have Flashblock installed on Firefox, so all I see is the placeholder. Nonetheless I got pissed off right away. I tried to calm myself down by thinking that maybe Jerry was told by management “Do this NOW,” so there was no time for notifying anyone, including the mods. However, after this:
As noted, there’s NOTHING in Jerry’s post about this. It would have taken the edge off of things.
I’ll be a lot politer than I’m tempted to be and just say “Get bent”.
If you choose to take offense over it that’s unfortunate but -
Oh, never mind. I don’t see any effing banners (IE7, Home Vista) but I also don’t see why anyone has to get bent out of shape over it.
I’m sorry if there is some confusion over whether or not the banner ad being displayed for all users is a temporary thing. That was not communicated to me. To the best of my knowledge a decision was made to show a banner ad to all users and I implemented that decision.
