(Not my actual thought, just dropping a reference.)
Banner ads? Fine, whatever. We’ve been looking at banner ads since the nineties. The only ones that bother me are ones with sound and ones that expand or otherwise obscure content. It could be a live webchat with Jessica Alba but if some goddamn Ford ad busts out from the edge of the screen, the window gets closed.
I just want to add my thank you to TubaDiva for voicing her opinion, and giving us support and encouragement.
…Thanks TubaDiva.
No it is not. You get the sidebars because you are not a member which also restricts you from seeing all the forums and sub-forums.
It costs a one time charge of $10 to become a member. Then you only have the top and bottom ads that are created and paid for by other members. If you don’t want to see those either you can pay a one time charge of $5 and those will go away too.
So for $15 you get a lifetime membership, as long as you follow the rules and don’t get banned, and you eliminate the banner ads.
Not going to happen. The years when the Reader was an actual “alternative” paper with all of the hippy-dippy-groovy connotations involved in that are way over. They’ve been bought out by an Atlanta corporation and it’s business, baby! Who cares about fighting ignorance? Hell, I’d bet that 95% of the officer-level personnel at the Reader’s new ownership have never even heard of Cecil Adams, this board, or fighting ignorance.
Yeah, but I’m too cheap to pay for the “no ads” upgrade, so I just put up with the ads.
Only sometimes. Popping over there, I see that on the main forums page, this morning the top banner ad is sponsored by veryshortlist.com, and the bottom is from studentoffortune.com, and that the top banner ad in the Games forum is from buydomains.com
Anyway, I agree there’s not an exact parallel, but the point is still valid: if you want to hang out at a certain website, you have to put up with it the way it is. And I think the many advantages of the SDMB make it worthwhile to put up with the way it is, which includes an annual subscription and now, apparently, one banner ad.
There was uproar when .img coding was disabled; there was uproar during the Winter of Our Missed Content; there was uproar when we went to pay-to-post; there was uproar when the first Google ad appeared. I think the SDMB is just overloaded with people predisposed towards uproar, is all. 
Bingo! This is exactly the way I feel about this situation. Banner ad at the top of the screen? Meh. Banner with sound that pops out and covers half the screen? Grrrr. I also hate the little “context links” that some sites have that pop up an ad when you move the mouse over them.
I was able to see the up-top banner ads from home last night. I have to admit … they’re now about as unobtrusive as banner ads can be. Very little risk of accidental rollover.
No it’s not, you slimy son of a bitch, and I hope you get your fool self banned for posting such a hateful, ignorant claim, and I refuse to set foot on this board until it happens! ( 
)
Can we call this the winter of our found discontent?
If current events offer any insight into management’s how-to-run-a-business acumen, then I’d suggest that not only has ownership never heard of the fight against ignorance, they’ve actually opened a new front in the war.
[nitpick]
It is a Tampa-Bay corporation.
[/nitpick]
And with that said, why would the interested / disgruntled parties not simply contact Ben Eason - Owner and CEO of Creative Loafing Incorporated?
Maybe not to whimper like puppies at the banner ad, but what the hell, maybe one of youse nice peoples more skillfull in communication than me could talk him into the version of VBulletin you have always dreamed about.
Maybe just stop in and say “Hi, thanks for buying the paper that fosters our board, I trust you will continue the level of top rate service that we are used to. And I trust you will continue to provide the members of this board with yearly coupons for a free Big Mac.”
It’s worth a try right?
Or, better yet, plan a nice Full Planet Dope Fest, inviting one and all from where ever to convine at the Creative Loafing office. It is in Tampa-Bay and spring is just around the corner. (mid winter getaways are nice too, just sayin’ is all)
I’m not seeing the banners at all now. Has the policy been changed? I can see them when I log out, so are they now only being shown to guests?
I don’t see a banner on the top of the page, maybe they took it off?
Same here - the board went unresponsive for a moment, then when the pages came back up, no ads.
…looks around for wood… drat, no wood in a cubicle! Will someone go knock on some wood for me?
I had to scroll back to the top of the page to check whether it had disappeared (which it appears to have done) - which shows how much I didn’t notice them in the first place…
Grim
<taps forehead>
I just unblocked, they appear to be gone.
Very cool.
Now we just need an update on what will be happening instead.
Jim
Done.
Just one question: Am I, as a paying member, going to benefit from the additional revenue coming from the ads? If the Reader spends a goodly portion of that money on additional services, added bandwidth, reduced outages, etc., I might join the “meh-I’m-blocking-them-anyway” group.
As it stands now, they have reduced the services I get for my $15, and doing it in a manner I find offensive.