and I will buy you a beer xxx

Thank you for the apology.

lol DD.

£1.49 and they all go away you know 🙂

I take that back.

Why didn’t anyone say?

For balance (may as well provide some), I managed to log in from work today without the browser going “”AAARGH, nooooooooooooo” and then firing a missile up its bumhole.

6 pages of whining.

Like a bunch of, well, blokes really.

proud of you guys

And for more balance, just got in and up jumps Tudor man right across the screen. Guess that was a targeted joke!?!? 😯

Emsz, shoosh now and go make us all a round of tasty sandwiches.

Just logged out to check out the adverts… and theres Nutella adverts everywhere! Gawd i love nutella… and the clever nutella reminded me that its pancake day tomorrow. Thank you adverts.

Is this really a life and death issue?

Boba Fatt – Member
Is this really a life and death issue?

What…. You mean you dont like nutella?

I may have missed it, but I’m fairly sure nobody threatened suicide or murdering.

Yes, yes it is. We’re glad you joined the thread. The more people here, the better our chance of saving this situation.

Depends if you’re trying to think about problems other than your regular bed-wetting?

Is this really a life and death issue?

There was a careless Whispa that the Nuttella boss had passed his “Best By” date

This is the best laid out forum I use by miles.

Really? Because where I’m sitting the only difference between here and 4chan is a disappointing lack of porn.

Seeing as Mark is involved here could he(you) explain why STW needs so much advertising as opposed to bigger forums with more features and users? Skyscrapercity being one example.

It’s not the concept that bothers me so much as the over-use of it. If it costs that much to run the forum I suggest you may want to find new hosts who don’t charge the national debt of a small country to host it. If it’s a part of an overall financial model for the magazine and wider website then fine.

As for avatars and sigs and stuff like that – you luddites do realise that you can easily disable all that with the click of a button yes?

As for avatars and sigs and stuff like that – you luddites do realise that you can easily disable all that with the click of a button yes?

Avatars and sigs are from 90s.

Right I want my money back, this thread promised consensus and so far I haven’t found any at all (Apart from the mini love in on the last page)

Avatars and sigs are from 90s.

Which is an advance on one step up from BBS yes? 😉

Signatures and avatars are shit!

I’m not sure how much clearer I can be on that issue.

Poll! Poll! Poll!

LFGSS is my default forum. They went through a radical change fairly recently; all members were invited to comment on the process by the fella that runs it. There’s minimal advertising, avatars, PM’s, and all very user friendly. The forum self moderates too, it really is a community.

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/131364/?offset=3850#comment11762439

Maybe worth a look for the STW bods? Might aid the detente process…?

This site could have minimal advertising too.
I’m not sure the 18 staff that rely on this site for a wage would be too happy about that.

Avatars? Brilliant idea! If you’re 12! 😆

With Mark on this one, seriously what sort of person needs to try and display their cool internet persona with some lame icon/tiny pic.
On sub forums I went on an Australian one to check current used shock prices, in the there is just about a sub for everything. MTBR has ones for 26″, 27.5″, 29″ and probably more. Here you can see a good hours worth of discussion. Just fix the search instead.

Another one on Marks side regarding avatars and sigs at the bottom of posts.

Signatures are inherently sad and the very few times i dare to venture in other forums that have them they just fills me with despair at the witty comments the users type about themselves, whether that be attempts at self deprecating humour or the ego led/alpha male strava stats or lists of equipment they own.

C’mon?, your typing on a forum, working your head into a froth over your increasing forum count when real people are out there doing stuff, with no time left in their days to beat themselves off over the keyboard. (I’m on here how much? 😉 )

And avatars?…gawd no……..you may think it says something about you? – yeah it does…you’re a **** tool.

And we don’t need sub forums either.

An idea for the For Sale forum but i dunno how practical it would be to implement : charge folk 1% of successful sales to go towards the cost of running the forum.

If i sell stuff i generally wait till it all adds up to a certain amount then bung a few £ into the paypal account as i really can’t be arsed listing stuff on ebay, and folk on here are generally pretty decent apart from those who commit to buy then pull out listing some pitiful “lack of money excuse.

All sorts of things this forum would benefit from which we’re always told that nobody wants (I presume that means Mark doesn’t want them 😉 ). However sigs, avatars and sub forums aren’t on that list – I’m with him (and the consensus?) on that. Not really sure what the point of sigs and avatars are, and rarely bother with them on forums which allow them – we’ve done the sub forum thing to death, and the all-in-one approach we have here is far, far better than setting up a load of cliques. I’m sure plenty of others like me don’t even split into bike and chat, but read the whole forum as one – the only time I remember there are two parts to it are when I start a new thread and have to pick.

I’m sure plenty of others like me don’t even split into bike and chat

Not me, I have no interest in pushbikes. I just like forums that feature the googly-eyed little fella 😯 . And will sign up to any that do.

Hope that helps.

There’s an occasional poster on here who never posts without. Start a thread on the history of mountainbiking and he’s sure to pop up.

Boba Fatt – Member

Is this really a life and death issue?

No! Its much more important than that! 😡

Oh well, the new Tudor (3x today) completely locks out the screen now. Worse than ever.

(And people are allowed to completely ignore forum rules – message understood.)

Here’s an idea for a poll

“Did you become a premier user because the ads were a pain in the arse and you were happy to pay to get rid of them?”

Aside from any revenue they generate for STW, I can’t see the ads being of any actual use for the product they’re selling. They’re so intrusive if you’re not logged in or a premier user, that I can’t imagine anyone going “wow, that’s a great product, I’m going to buy it right now”. More likely they go “what kind of massive **** company thinks that’s an acceptable way to advertise. I’m never using their products”

Sensibly chosen ads are good, and I know a lot of ad stuff is generated by user’s browsing history, but we all seem to be getting twatted with the massive watch one, Audi wanting to know where we are etc.

Oh, and if you click on a STW link on Facebook, it now opens in some Facebook created browser which doesn’t register me as being logged in, therefore the big **** adverts appear and I then need to click to open it up in Chrome instead. That’s obviously Facebook being **** but it’s still a pain.

This was raised previously and I’m sceptical. I tend to think the advertising companies have much better data on this than you or I.

This was raised previously and I’m sceptical. I tend to think the advertising companies have much better data on this than you or I.

My understanding of it, is that it’s more important to be aware of a brand. Than to click their advert.

And for more balance, just got in and up jumps Tudor man right across the screen. Guess that was a targeted joke!?!?

What a brilliant idea! Instead of bans you could just crank up the ad frequency for miscreants. Win/win – less trouble and more income 🙂

Which is an advance on one step up from BBS yes?

What’s wrong with a BBS?

ll sorts of things this forum would benefit from which we’re always told that nobody wants (I presume that means Mark doesn’t want them ).

You appear to have confused “democracy” with “benevolent dictatorship.”

if you click on a STW link on Facebook, it now opens in some Facebook created browser which doesn’t register me as being logged in,

That’s a setting in the Facebook app, you can change it. (Though that’s probably our fault as well.)

Aside from any revenue they generate for STW, I can’t see the ads being of any actual use for the product they’re selling. They’re so intrusive if you’re not logged in or a premier user, that I can’t imagine anyone going “wow, that’s a great product, I’m going to buy it right now”. More likely they go “what kind of massive **** company thinks that’s an acceptable way to advertise. I’m never using their products”

It’s a numbers game. Advertiser and agency know they need to serve X number of impressions to demographically targeted audience to generate Y number of clicks, which then infers Z number of conversions downline. Take target number of sales/resultant revenue generation for campaign, reverse the maths and this gives number of impressions they need to serve to have a shot at this conversion figure.

Classic sales funnel model. It’s all about maths, numbers and definitely nothing to do with emotion.

Every unreactive impression served brings them statistically closer to a reactive one.

My understanding of it, is that it’s more important to be aware of a brand. Than to click their advert.

Probably true, we now all know that Lloyds do banking and divers wear watches. They are probably also patting themselves on the back from the extra clicks despite so few agreed pop ups even though they will pretty much be all accidental while trying to hit the X.

As a new member I have to say I really like the layout of the forum into bike/chat rather than a screen full of sub forums.

The only benefit I can see of having avatars and signatures is that you tell pretty quickly who is going to be really f****n annoying……but it’s much more fun working that out. I also like the fact there is no post count as that often gives people an air of superiority over new users.

I realise I am new and will be told that I know **** all about what it was like back in the good ole days but from here it looks like a really good forum.

So far as being a P user – I did that for the digital subscription rather than to remove the adverts but admit that removing them has been an added bonus.