I’ve been having trouble the last two days with pop-up ads that show up on my iPhone either when I go do the Straight Dope or when I try to open a thread even while logged in. The one showing up when I tried to go to the board was one of those phony ‘You have been selected to win an Apple…’ phishing scams that could not be closed out without giving personal information (apart from navigating to JavaScript and turning JavaScript off, which negatively affects other sites) and today I’ve been getting pop-over ads that come one after another when I try to close them out by clicking the X. Very annoying and likely to drive away traffic. It will surely drive mine away during those times I’m away from my desktop computer if it doesn’t get fixed soon, and I’m a pro-business guy who doesn’t usually object to seeing ads as long as they aren’t obnoxious like the ones I’ve been getting the last couple of days.
Same for phone. Absolutely horrible.
I got the same thing on an iPad. Very, very annoying. I ended up just closing the tab and going to my computer.
Board growth is more important for your long term than trying to milk your customers with particularly obnoxious ads. These will kill a lot more potential new recruits for the board than it will cel anything.
Plus, think about your demographics. Obnoxious popunders might work on the least savy internet users, but do you think the people who come here are going to fall for that shit, or be the type who’s particularly repelled by it?
This is clearly a losing proposition.
If you need more revenue, you’d be better off asking the board to do so by offering some sort of minor rewards for membership or other micropayments. I’m willing to support the board (as my charter membership attests) and I suspect a lot more people will do so if you make a concerted effort to ask for that.
For the record, I’d probably throw down for a membership if you guys offered another of those Charter Membership amnesty deals.
Well, for the record, I am unlikely to buy a membership in a board that serves skeezy ads to other people. It’s just not the sort of thing I feel like I ought to support.
But I just navigated here using my Windows computer that doesn’t have any ad blocking, and I didn’t get the popunder, so that’s a good thing. 
Yes, I tried to get in but lost the edit window. If the Dope looked into alternate revenue streams alongside an effort to stop being so damned greasy, I would be more likely to throw down some cash.
Of course, these are the same guys who refuse to sell official SDMB merchandise to people who would snap that up like Hungry Hungry Hippos, so what the hell do I know?
I’ve never considered signing up for a message board that bombards me with ads, but I’m willing to pay to support a good one. The people you want to appeal to are not idiots who browse the dregs of the internet and don’t mind sound/flashing/popunder ads. They’re people who get really turned off by that sort of thing. Look for alternate methods of monetization or this board will never get out of its death spiral.
I’m fairly convinced we’re already in a death spiral that we’ll never get out of. Ed used to have autonomy with this board. That is no longer the case. Over time, control over even the most minor aspects of the board have been stripped from him. For example, we no longer have moderators who are privileged to do something so minor as a name change.
Over the years, Cecil and the Straight Dope have been transferred from company to company, and in the process have become an ever smaller piece of the pie. We (the message board) are even smaller yet. We are a very, very tiny section of a multi-media conglomerate, and our best chance of surviving is to hope they never have a reason to notice we exist.
Too late, clearly, because somebody told somebody else to monetize the boards. That’s why we have ads.
It just so happens that the ads are not only a lazy way to monetize the boards, but a bad way to monetize the boards, too, because there are more effective ways to go about making money.
Moderators never had the ability to change names. Only Admins did.
There’s nothing wrong with ads to monetize the board. There was a perfectly okay ad for some real estate company at the top of the page today, for instance. It’s the ads with lurid pictures that i don’t want seen at work, and the ones that actively hijack the browsing experience that are problematic.
There have been proposals for the teeming millions to design t shirts, but board members here never seriously stepped up to the plate.
True. I think what he meant was that we used to have three people besides Ed who could perform Admin duties and now it is just Ed (and maybe one tech guy).
Maybe Tapatalk works. I’m not gonna find out. I can now though not even click off an ad to get to the MB on my phone.
Intrusive invasive ads are bad. Someone trying to come here for a first time, while on a phone, may be having the same experience I have, and won’t even be able to see what the board is as it hijacks the user instead “you have been chosen!”
A very bad business decision. Worst ever.
Might have had something to do with the categorical refusal of TPTB to even consider selling them if designed. Every thread I saw it mentioned was responded to with “we got a warehouse full of unsold books and coffee mugs. No thanks”. Hey what about one of those cafe press type things where you don’t have to buy inventory? “We said no thanks.” But you’re right, someone could have designed a killer shirt anyways.
They could have also just put up a donate button but apparently that scares them too.
This is exactly correct. It was Pay to Post that irreparably killed this place. If they had done a donation drive instead of that, they’d have made a ton of money. A yearly pledge drive, with auctions for things like a book signed by “Cecil” and and custom titles for a big enough donation would have more than sustained this place. It’s a damn shame.
I’m using an older version of Tapatalk, because Tapatalk got more intrusive, too. It works great with this board, and oddly, doesn’t show any ads.
This place has a lot of users, and it’s not very expensive to run a message board if the mods are volunteers. I’m sure that would have drawn enough to keep the place afloat.