Great post. So many truths in here. tremorviolet: Tis’ a shame, I hope things will have improved enough when you check back that you choose to stay. You’ll be missed.
kunilou, understand completely, I have avoided ad-blockers so far, I dislike the Hosts file fix I recommended as it leave a noticeable pause on my PC before loading each page. Nothing I cannot tolerate, but I am annoyed I had to do this at all and I am annoyed that the owners of the board might have pushed things too far and caused a loss of many more posters. I imagine this is similar on a much smaller scale to the Pay to Post days, many posters still lament the posters lost then.
I hope the owners make some tweaks to this bad idea and you stick around.
You know, it’s ironic. Just yesterday I was contemplating posting my first comments ever regarding the administration of this board, by chastising those who seemed to me to be continuously bitching about it. “Count yourselves lucky,” I was going to say. “Once upon a time I belonged to a very popular board whose administrator closed it down with a little under 24 hours notice because they were having a bad day and couldn’t take the drama, or something, and several thousand people suddenly had to find another place to go.”
And now this.
And you know what? The ads just started appearing for me today, and really I hardly notice them (of course, they haven’t started screaming at me or anything yet…knock on wood). What really bothers me is the response that the complaints/concerns are getting (with the exception of Giraffe), which is apparently “We don’t know what’s going on, we’re looking into it, if you don’t like it that’s your fucking problem. Silence” Thinking back on all the years I’ve lurked/posted here, it occurs to me that this is pretty much that standard canned reply to every complaint/concern regarding the board. When a kind word of reassurance or maybe even an apology could go so far to dissipate everyone’s negative reactions, the PTB choose to be silent.
And that bothers me. Much more than moving banner ads.
I agree completely with this post. I have never, ever complained before, and have all the ads blocked, so it’s not like I am bothered by them. But I am very bothered by the principle of the thing. I don’t like to support businesses that hold their customers in contempt. I suspect many people on this board have strong principles, and will leave even if they are not personally affected by the ads.
The HOSTS file fix is very easy. Absolutely no technical knowledge of any kind is required to employ it, and it is much faster than changing browsers or installing new software.
Now I have them too. Yeah, I know how to block them, but that is really beside the point. The issue is that the Reader doesn’t respect its paying customers. You can block the evidence of that fact, but not the fact itself.
I’m not some freeloader here. I paid exactly what the Reader asked me to pay for this service. In fact, I paid more because I couldn’t be arsed to take advantage of the charter member deal. Now the Reader is trying to make a few extra bucks by degrading that service a bit. No warning. No discussion. Fuck that.
I wasn’t going to throw a hissy fit yesterday and stomp off. So I slept on it. And I’m still thinking that I’m not going to pay someone money who behaves like this. I’ll blow a whole lot more than 15 bucks on good service, but I won’t pay a dime to be put upon.
Another echo for** missbunny** here. Both the ads and the (lack) of communication are a slap in the face of the SDMB.
Count me in as another one who feels the ads are intrusive, ugly, and annoying, and I feel cheated. That’s not what I paid for.
The mods aren’t to blame, but I feel it is unreasonable that Jerry won’t answer the legitimate question who made this decision, and won’t tell us where we can direct our complains.
Is there any possibility we can start again somewhere else? How hard can it be to run a messageboard somewhere else, especially if 3000 people pay a 10 dollar membership price on average? Would fathom be a good alternative?
So far, I’ve had the same one each time, trying to convince me to switch from dial-up to DSL. I’ve got a cable modem, so they’re wrong there anyway, but forget that. If the two Jehovah’s Witness-like DSL salesmen couldn’t convince me to switch a couple of months ago, a damn banner ad hasn’t got a chance.
-Lil
Fathom is a good board, Maastricht, and **OpalCat ** is a good person. She both owns and administers the board. It is a very different look and feel, however, and it’s hard for some people to adjust to such a drastic change. But then again, SDMB used to look quite a bit different too.
I’m not sure you’re right, since I opened my browser, came here, read, and then shut my browser. I am pretty sure I didn’t click on anything I don’t normally click on. However, if I’m the only one, and it doesn’t happen again, fine. (I still do not want anything that flashes, moves or makes noise.) FTR, I have Firefox.
I appreciate that for many people tweaking a file in their computers is no problem at all and is a great way to stick it to the man. However, if someone is using a computer at work, their boss may not have a problem with a little casual surfing, but cracking in to change anything could get them fired.
More to the point, however, I deeply resent the idea that I should have to do anything to my computer to get rid of these ads. As I said upthread, this isn’t what I signed up for when the board went to P2P.
If you click on the [Reader’s online rate sheet](Chicago Reader Online Rate Sheet) at the bottom of this page, you’ll see that the advertising charge for the Reader’s content (not this board, but the Reader’s web site) is $12 per thousand for the first 199,000 impressions. I repeat, I’m willing to pay $12 per year to make the ads go away. If I access the boards more than 1,000 times a year, I’ll be willing to pay more.
Ugh, you are such a selfish bitch! You need to realize that there is a world outside of the Dope, ok? Like, just close your browser and go live in the real world for a while, man. Oh, you don’t like the admins and mods here? Well, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out! We all like it here, regardless of all the incredibly poor decisions made by the admins on an almost daily rate.
Next you’re going to tell me you get a lot of time outs, too. You’re a fucking dirty liar, Zsofia! THERE ARE NO TIMEOUTS, OK?
We are not afraid of the banner ads and timeouts. Allah has condemned them. They are stupid. They are stupid (dramatic pause) and they are condemned.
(This is what happens when I operate on little sleep heh)
I’m with ya, though I think my absence would just bring about happiness among the masses. “Wow, there’s a whole lot less ditzy around the board lately. I wonder what changed?”
A boycott would be … interesting. Personally I feel like it would be like the proverbial herding of cats, but it would be interesting to see how many people agree to it and how much effect it would ultimately have. I’d participate, if anyone organized it.
Luckily, I only got the non-moving, non-shouting banner ads, and thanks to this thread, I now have gotten off my lazy ass and installed the Adblock program. I can from here on block all the ads out there! Woohoo!
Merci bien, new Chicago Reader overlords!
By the way, since it seems like the cool thing to do, if the ads are still here by the time re-subscription time rolls around, I will also leave. Not because the ads bother me so much, but because I suspect the population of this board would drop significantly, and the result would not be worth the $$$.
[runs off to all of his favorite websites to disable their ads]
I’m just blown away that paid members are getting ads–usually one of the perks of membership in an online community is that members don’t have to see ads.
The IE fix is not working. I’d like to try the HOSTS fix but now we discover the limits of my computer literacy. How do I find and open the file? Small words, please.
A boycott that doesn’t affect revenue would be useless. If the collective voice of the SDMB wants to affect TPTB, the only answer is to cease paying at the next opportunity.
Eh … don’t think of it as “cracking in” to do something that only an IT person should do. It’s more on par with disabling/enabling automatic spell-check in MS Word or fiddling with your Outlook calendar or something like that.
I think the problem is what has been mentioned earlier in the thread – the people who make the major decisions about the site are not the ones who spend all their time here. So not only are their priorities going to be different, but information is going to travel slowly in both directions and the site’s representatives (us) are rarely going to be able to speak with authority on decisions in progress. It sucks, to be honest.
I’m hoping the fact that so many people feel the board is viewed with contempt and/or indifference (neither of which is true, IMO) will serve as a wake-up call to those running the site to improve their communication with the membership. It will never be perfect – the fact that owners are not simply the admins will always make information flow a slower, more lossy process, but I think it can (and should be) better. It would be a tragedy to lose members over something as fixable as poor communication.
