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We continue to make changes. After being distracted by wierd robots speaking in japanese overnight we are back on to optimistaion work. Anthony is working on the posting delay issue. Working with various cache controls and other complicated things.
I'm working on the Ad Block detection. I have an idea, based on feedback from here and specifically @cougar (cheers).
The next bit is for the techies..
The CMP script does two things. It generates the GDPR popup to get consent AND it detects Ad Block tech. I think I've managed to separate the two functions into separate code snippets. This means I can now control them independently. The CMP must fire on the very first page you hit (Detects if you have already given consent and moves on by standard cookie detection - consent cookies should last 12 months). But I should be able to set up the Ad Block Detection script to only fire after X number of page impressions. If I can do that then subscribers can login BEFORE the script fires, which will bypass the whole Ad block detection. That should mean that you won't even need to whiteliest the site. Your existing Ad block setup should be able to be left untouched.
It will all depend on you being logged in before the script fires. If you click on a few pages before you login you could trigger it. Since ads will show for free members this won't help there. Free members would still need to whitelist the site to avoid the adblock detection.
It's not in place yet but I'll update here when it is.
It’s been incredibly slow to access STW on my iPhone the last week.
Just took roughly 1 minute of staring at a blank screen before anything appeared
Bots are back.
And you've clicked that wrong checkbox on ad- free Mark, unable to access the site on any browser on my PC. The one time passcode not letting me in, or my password
After being distracted by wierd robots speaking in japanese overnight we are back on to optimistaion work. Anthony is working on the posting delay issue.
I said this before but I don't know if it got lost. It looks to me like when you click a link it fetches the entire thread and then hops to the first / last / last read / whichever page. This would explain why large threads take longer, and why it flashes up the first page before (usually) showing the correct one.
I'm not a DBA but this feels like an SQL query misstep - surely you should only be SELECTing the data you want to display rather than pulling the whole thread and then filtering out the 95% you don't need. That first page shouldn't be in the returned results to show in the first place.
I could be talking out the top of my head here, but that's how it appears.
Remember the forum software is not our code. It's Wpforo.com
We could fork the plugin and start changing how it works but then that opens a whole new can of worms.
And you've clicked that wrong checkbox on ad- free Mark, unable to access the site on any browser on my PC. The one time passcode not letting me in, or my password
Our login does not require a passcode. I think you are trying to login to the AdFree subscription. That's not a Singletrack subscription.
If you want to email me direct with info on what browser you are using and device I can help you out
For subscribers. do NOT click the 'Already an Ad-Free subscriber? Login' link. You are not an Ad Free subscriber. I know it's confusing but getting Uniconsent to make meaningful changes to this popup is a job of work akin to sending short messages by pigeon. Singletrack subscribers you have two options here. And if our site cookies are allowed to be stored on your device it's something you should only need to do once/year.
1) Click on the Accept and Continue button and then login as normal.
2) Click the link in green (It's not green in the real world, I've just highlighted it). This will take you direct to the login page.
Just to be contrary I came here to say that I have finally been allowed to click on the ad free button with shields up in Brave and also in Edge.
I then clicked on the ad free subscriber log in in Edge. I logged in with a passcode and it allowed me to subscribe to ad free for £15.
I am now logged in to my account and I do not see any ads
Singletrack subscribers you have two options here. And if our site cookies are allowed to be stored on your device it's something you should only need to do once/year.
1) Click on the Accept and Continue button and then login as normal.
2) Click the link in green (It's not green in the real world, I've just highlighted it). This will take you direct to the login page.
Thanks Mark, it would be great if the link in green was in real life a BIG link in green so it was obvious. But you look at that pop-up and see two big blue buttons to click and it;s easy to miss the link buried in the text.
And i reckon JPt853 should be giving singletrack money not AdFree, but the whole experience is very not user friendly
Apologies if grumpy, I was getting flummoxed by a Gridserve fast charger UI on the M1 at midnight last night with another 2 hours of driving, and their UI was equally opaque
Remember the forum software is not our code. It's Wpforo.com
We could fork the plugin and start changing how it works but then that opens a whole new can of worms.
Ah yes. So you upgrade to the next version and if you haven't been very careful it reverts all your custom code.
Now, where did I put that particular tee-shirt...
On AdFree,
Am I right in thinking that sub will then also apply to every other site which uses AdFree? (Not that I know of any, but...)
How much of that money do you see? I'm assuming/hoping it's more lucrative than adverts even if you only get Spotify royalties levels of kickback from it.
We get ‘most’ of it. I’ll know more in a month from now. I honestly don’t know if it counts for other websites. I wasn’t expecting it to. I’ve priced it for our site.
There's a new version of Wpforo in beta at the moment. It looks like it will bring some nice stuff to the table when it's released properly. We are about to start testing it on our dev site.
For interested techies... This is what we are doing battle with right now. A report from our logs for the last 30 minutes..
52.167.144.160 — very high volume, firing every 10–20 seconds with garbage queries in Arabic, Chinese, Khmer, Vietnamese, English and more. This is a new IP from earlier (was .173 and .215 before). Classic rotating IP evasion — same /16 subnet, new host.
52.167.144.215 — also active, firing bike-adjacent queries like schwalbe marathon plus, santa cruz wheels, headset cable replacement mixed with obvious garbage. Interestingly some of these look almost plausible for your site — worth noting, though the rate and pattern still marks this as bot behaviour.
157.55.39.62 and 157.55.39.14 — both active simultaneously, firing every 2–5 seconds at points, with queries like bontrager xl bike helmets, BCA BIKES CROSSFIRE, lime bike 20 min ride, and then complete gibberish. This is the 157.55.39.x range that was active this morning.
52.160.0.0 is a /11 subnet owned by Microsoft (I think, it's been a while) so presumably 52.167.144.16 is inside an Azure tenant somewhere? The 157 addresses are similar.
MSFT has an abuse@ address, though how effective that is I don't know. You'd probably be playing whack-a-mole.
It's Bing search engine doing the crawling. It is wakamole at the mmoment until we can sort out a solution.
Kinsta have Cloudflare up front as part of the package but it's a single instance that protects the entire Kinsta client base. So they can't set up individual blocks in their filters. They can only set allow rules. This is because any disallow filters they set up for us may bugger up some other clients website. A potential soloution is that we setup our own Cloudflare account and configure that to run on our dedicated server. Then we can set up all the specific allow and block rules we need.
The whole ad block detection has been a bit of a shit show. On iPhone the go ad free red button didn’t do anything for quite a while so I was locked out. The flow is now different, but it was still a fiddle to get to a point where I could login as a magazine subscriber. I eventually found a why are we doing this link which got me to a point where I could access the regular site menu to login. Hopefully the magazine is still going to turn up in an easy to open package 😉
I was wondering what was going on. Why the hell would anyone want to take STW offline?
Freeads gives some strange blockouts where an ad should be so you cannot see some of the topics or text in topics. It is just random.
Brave and Edge for me.
Hopefully picture load works as I have not had to use postimages since the redesign
I would also say Freeads is opaque
The below plus an invoice attached to an email is all you get
No details about how autorenewal works etc, no links to anything. Manage email preferences is a dead link for me
Let me know how it works. Ther is a certain amount of me ensuring the code that is required is present on every page you visit.
No problem, I am not moaning as such just giving some observations which may be useful
Might have been mentioned before, but uploaded picture quality seems terrible for me - like worse than Facebook levels of compression. Is it the same for everyone else and is it something we are going to have to live with?
A quick test.
It is compressed but not too badly. The food was excellent.
A quick test.
The problem of the wrong image coming up in the lightbox when you click on it seems to be back with that. I click the picture of a burger and chips and a screenshot of the cookie banner comes up in the enlarged view.
It is compressed but not too badly
It doesn't look quite as bad as some of the pics I upload tbh - maybe it's a me thing
But also, yeah, as toby says 🙄
I prefer chunky chips
The problem of the wrong image coming up in the lightbox when you click on it seems to be back with that. I click the picture of a burger and chips and a screenshot of the cookie banner comes up in the enlarged view.
Yeah I noticed that.
I prefer chunky chips
Fried for burgers.
Have we lost the ability to find our posts in our account or am I just being dumb? Was hoping to update a couple of threads I started 😕
Is there a way to pay to go ad free (i.e. just the forum) paying STW directly rather than uniconsent?
Is there a way to pay to go ad free (i.e. just the forum) paying STW directly rather than uniconsent?
join as a paid member?
Is there a way to pay to go ad free (i.e. just the forum) paying STW directly rather than uniconsent?
join as a paid member?
If that is an option it's well hidden - I can only see subscription options, not just a forum only membership for no ads. Feel free to point me to the link!
Thanks Ped.
Still work to do. Getting it consistently fast is still a challenge. For some reason we are being relentlessly targeted by bots. Right now there are over 1.2k ‘users’ on the site from Singapore.
@Ewan https://singletrackworld.com/membership/, you then select Digital from the drop-down options and then Annual from payment drop-down. It shows £30.99.
@DickBarton - yes I found that one, but there is a pay 15 quid option to ditch the ads on the banner but that goes to some sketchy company who seems not to let you cancel. I'd rather give that 15 quid to STW for just forum with no ads. I'd never find the time to read the actual mag!
Stw don't do a forum-only sub, they do a digital and currently that is the only option that gives 100% to stw.
Mark posted earlier (maybe 2 days ago) about the ad-free option, but that isn't anything to do with stw, although they get a portion (unknown for now).
If STW are fine with the concept of users paying £15 for ad-free access to the site (but no subscription content), and if there's already mechanisms by which the site chooses to serve ads or not depending on member status... wouldn't it make more sense to introduce an STW option for £15 without needing an external company? I do realise that even a seemingly simple option takes more coding behind the scenes than is obvious. But the current solution feels a bit bodgy, and I think having a dodgy looking and potentially confusing thing on access does risk giving a bad impression.
Update from me on Freeads. The add glitches I posted above stopped yesterday morning so that is good.
It doesn't like Brave on my iphone. I get the adblock almost every page click, it usually disappears after hitting refresh but I seem to have to sign in to Freeads every day currently.
I have had no further emails from the company. If I visit their websites they are clearly setup with the mindset that STW is their customer. I cannot find details about how it works for the end user, auto renew and cancellations are a mystery which is really poor. If anyone knows about this I would be interested to hear.
Honestly I wish I hadn't gone down this route
I’ve passed on your feedback. I’ll update when I get a response.
If you create an Ad Free account you can login and access your account here https://account.adfreepro.com/plans
Once logged in the menu in the top right of the screen will take you to an option including 'subscriptions'. You can see all your individual website subscriptions and you can cancel or edit your details there.
A reasonable question has been raised about why we simply don't just create our own ad free account subscription. There's several factors as to why - they are NOT uncomplicated but I'll try and briefly explain.
This option is primarily an option that deals with the issue of ad blockers and consent. The problem we and all publishers face is that when GDPR consent is not given it creates a loophole that costs us in lost revenue for the revenue we earn when a user does consent. In many cases, including ours, the practical result of hitting the no consent option in our CMP (The popup you get when you first visit the site or come via a privacy browser like Brave or DuckDuckGo) means we don't show you ads. That's unsustainable for us.
This new system means that loophole is now closed. I'm sure some very technical people will be able to manipulate a hack at some point.
If we simply add a new option to our existing subs options for an ad free sub that does not include paywall access then this does not close the consent loophole. You would still be able to refuse consent and get no ads.
But also, there's another reason.
VAT
Our subscriptions all involve passing through our content paywall. Our subscriptions are designed to give you access to our content and journalism. This means, just like for all media outlets, that we don't need to include VAT in the price. That is a recent change in the law (A few years ago) that fixed an unfairness. Prior to the change in tax status of all journalism only content that was printed on paper was zero rated for VAT. So as soon as content was digitised it became VATable. The original intention of the zero rated journalism rule was that news and editorial content was deemed to be valubale enough to be an essential product - this also included books. The government should not be taxing people reading was the general principal. But it only applied to content on paper and as soon as most content became digital this undermined that principal. Essentially instead of a right to read untaxed it became a tax break for the paper industry. This anomaly was 'fixed' by the previous government when they made all content produced by whatever medium, paper or digital, zero rated for VAT.
That simplified so much of the admin for us and every other publisher. Previous to that we had to aportion a part of every amount paid for a print subscription as a 'digital element' and charge VAT on that. Having a product with mixed VAT status is a bloody ballache to account for. We also had to aportion a full 20% for VAT on all digital only subscriptions. Once the VAT rules changed things got really simple and straight forward. All our subscriptions, print OR digital could be treated the same for VAT ie. zero rated.
Remember when Amazon started selling ebooks and the prices were more expensive for the ebook than the paper version? That was because paper books = no VAT - digital books +20% VAT.
If we create a new ad free only subscription with no paywall access then we will have to add 20% VAT to the price and then make sure that any transactions related to that particular subscription are separated from all other subscriptions so we can deal with the VAT properly. Not impossible but it does come at a cost of admin, accounting and other things I really don;t want to have to deal with.
And remember, none of that solves the non consent, no ads problem from ad blockers and privacy browsers.
By using AdFree to deal with these types of 'subscriptions' I can just focus on our existing paywall/print subscriptions as normal. I don't need to change our accounts to deal with mixed VAT subscriptions AND it addresses our non-consent adblocking losses.
Hope that explains thinsg from our POV a bit better.
Thanks @Mark - I was unaware of the VAT thing. I could suggest options to avoid it (e.g. you just make some other piece of content available that fits the governments version of journalism or just make only a single magazine available) but I guess you have considered that.... I'd much rather give you guys 15 quid than some random company, and 15 quid is a much easier sell than 30 for a full subscription I won't use.
One more question from me, re the cookie consent effectively blocking ads. My default on all websites is to select 'only essential' as I think GDPR is a fairly good piece of legislation for consumers, I still see ads on those sites. What is different about STW that means no cookies, no adverts?
Fudging a subscription to have a kind of editorial content, like a single issue or the like to claim it's an editorial subscription to journalism is called tax evasion. We'd be fraudulently creating a product to specifically avoid VAT. HMRC tends to not like that sort of 'scheme'. I'm not going down that route where I may have to stand up and start a sentence with 'Well technically speaking your honour....'
As for the essential only cookie question that is a realm of grey. What is essential is not properly defined. The general consensus or acceptance of that is any cookies that re needed by us to make the site work or our business run properly we can list as essential. Obvioulsly cookies that store login information toallow the website to know if you are one type of user or another are essential - you wouldn't be able to login without them. But there are other types too like cookies for plugins or software we use to count page views. Google analytics is one such cookie. Some CMPs will block Google's analytics cookies and I think it's an option for users to disable those types of cookie if they choose to. There is a strong argument though that those analytics cookies are essentail to a publisher as it's the data they help to create that lets' parts of the business function. For direct ad sales to advertisers in the bikeindustry for example that are not tracking ads themselves (theyare just jpgs mostly) they will want to know what our traffic numbers are before they commit to a contract with us. Google Analyitics is the industry standard tool for that. Not being able to track how many users come to the site is bit like a nightclub owner not being able to know how many people came in the club last night because some customers asked not to be counted.
I see the arguments on both sides. For our part we have set up our google anlyics account to only track anonymously so the data will never be able to drill down to identify an individual. How far you trust Google with that kind of control I imagine is variable. Regardless it demonstrates the ambiguity in the system about what is business critical and what isn't.
There's another facet to the essential cookies topic. When you select essential only it stops all tracking cookies from advertising networks. But, as you say, sometimes you still see ads. Those ads are ads that are essentailly tracking free - they are mostly just image files, jpgs, gifs etc. The advertsiers behind those ads have a choice when they create the campaigns and set them live on whatever platform they choose - The largest platform for advertisers is Google Ads.
The advertiser can select tracking or non tracking. The price they pay will depend on their choice. Tracking ads are more expensive because they can set the targeting. for example. Only show to British users between the ages of 35 and 45 who have an affinity for outdoor sports. The tighter the targeting the more expensive the price they will have to pay (prices are set by auction - if two or more advertisers set the same targeting criteria the price is set by the one with the highest budget/bid per display.)
Non targeting ads are obviously very cheap as the advertiser will have no clue as to where they show up. Very few advertisers choose that option as it just doesn't make good financial sense. Rarely will an ad campaign succeed in it's aims without some kind of targeting.
The price we get for any ad that is shown on the site depends on the price paid by the advertiser (in 90% of cases that's a set price/click) based on the results of an instant auction. This can be the difference between say £2/click to £0.001/click for a non targeted ad. In short non targeted ads are pretty worthless to everyone involved in their delivery. So inconsequantial are non targeted ads to the bottom lines of all the parties involved that many networks just don't bother showing them. Our programmatic ad partner SportsNetwork inject none of these ads into their publishers sites as they are to all extents worthless. Also it tends to be the worst kinds of ads for quality that opt for non targeted campaigns - so there's a price to pay for the publisher in display barrel bottom ads.
So, when you still see ads. Those are cheap ads that don't help out the publisher. It's considered better to not display any at all than run them. ergo the problem some sites, like us have, when consent isn't given. In the worst case you end up with awful ads and we get no money.
Ah and some may spot the point I make about clicking ads. 90% of all ad campaigns run through ad networks like google are pay per click. That means the advertiser doesn't pay just because an ad is seen. They only pay when it's clicked. At our end we are quoted a cpm rate ie. a price per thousand impressions of an ad. This figure is an average and isn't actually real. We DON'T get paid because an ad is viewed. We get paid when it's clicked - it's just that the system averages it all out to give us an effective CPM rate so we can make qualititive assesments about where the bigger picture is working for us.
There are a small percentage of campaigns that do opt to pay by views so it's not true to say that we don't earn unless an ad is clicked. But the majority of the money that flows through the system depends on ads that get clicked.
I've just seen the new profile page. That's a vast improvement, nice.
Minor point, the "website" link still has the old URL, which is dead.
Also,
Going up a level, the Members screen appears to show a bunch of random members but I think it's displaying in order of post count. It'd perhaps make more sense / be more useful to reverse this sort order. (Not least because it'd filter me to the top.😁)
I think it's only showing Full Members also. If my maths is correct that means we have 4,717 subscribers. Does that sound about right? I tried to see if Search would return Free Members as well as Full, but the search doesn't do anything.
[EDIT: scratch that, it just takes ages after the Working wheel disappears, and yes there are no Free members returned. Searching for ewan (the first Free Member name I saw on this thread when looking for an example) returns ewangronk and ewanmackie but no ewan.]
My default on all websites is to select 'only essential' as I think GDPR is a fairly good piece of legislation for consumers, I still see ads on those sites.
Would this be "Legitimate Interest" perhaps? I wrote about this a while back but basically you can decline explicit consent and a site can still process your data if they believe they have a justifiable reason to do so anyway. I'm guessing of course but that might be why you're still seeing adverts on those sites.
This option is primarily an option that deals with the issue of ad blockers and consent. The problem we and all publishers face is that when GDPR consent is not given it creates a loophole that costs us in lost revenue for the revenue we earn when a user does consent. In many cases, including ours, the practical result of hitting the no consent option in our CMP (The popup you get when you first visit the site or come via a privacy browser like Brave or DuckDuckGo) means we don't show you ads. That's unsustainable for us.
I wonder idly - not specifically on STW but across the broader Internet - whether more people would be inclined to agree to this sort of stuff if it was made clearer as to why. "We'd really like it if you chose these options at least, we promise we won't sell your soul and it'll keep us in business" is to my mind a much more compelling argument than a pageful of options and small print that no-one really understands.
It's got to a point now where it's like when you have to accept a 20-page EULA just to install a printer driver. I've just started hitting "no" because I've run out of patience with going through consent popups multiple times a day, every day and I'm not going to blindly agree because who knows what I'm agreeing to. "Pay up or go away" dialogues make me question whether I actually want to view this content that badly or I can get similar from elsewhere.
Maybe I'm in the minority and most people just hit OK. Which rather feels like it's exactly how many of these consent forms are intentionally designed.
85% click ok
@Mark my understanding is that there are three types of ads - personalised, contextual, and random. The personalised ads obviously pay good money as you've outlined but require cookies, the random ads don't pay very much, but i'd assumed the contextual ones aren't too bad? Does STW do contextual ads or is this a limitation of the ad network?
By contextual, I mean the type that read the content of the webpage and then serve the appropriate ad (e.g. on a thread about dropper posts, it serves a bike shop) - I think these are a standard google type of ad and don't require non-essential cookies.
Contextual ads are mostly the direct ads that we ourselves sell by definition. Contextual ads through the programmatic channels make up a very small percentage. When Google was dabbling with replacing cookies last year, contextual ads were being touted as the saviour of publishers livlihoods since without tracking cookies they would essentially be the new top dog in targeted advertising. Google then cancelled their plans to replace cookies and so we are back to the majority of ads being the cookie intesive tracking kind.
How do I get rid of all the awful adverts, including the intrusive pop-up ones?
...you pay! No other option now.
If you turn off javascript the site is almost bearable but you can only read threads. You can do this on a site by site basis in chrome.
I disagree with all the content comments as the content has been provided by free users and as a reward they should be able to read their content without intrusive tracking and ads. The content is provided for free to crawlers, so simply turn off js and become a crawler. By all means paywall the staff provided and value added stuff or provide a better ad experience, there are many many higher traffic sites that monetise in much more intelligent and less intrusive ways.
the content has been provided by free users and as a reward they should be able to read their content without intrusive tracking and ads.
That's true to a point, but the obvious reality is that the forum infrastructure isn't provided for free. Sure, we can all spout our nonsense into the ether or shout at pigeons in the park for free, but the forum itself (even ignoring the fact that it's intertwined both technically and conceptually with the other stuff, whether forum-only-users like it or not) does have ongoing costs. And they're not trivially small costs. They have to be paid for somehow, right?
I disagree with all the content comments as the content has been provided by free users and as a reward they should be able to read their content without intrusive tracking and ads.
It costs STW money for you to able to post, you also get to read other people’s posts and articles.
Is there any commercial platforms where the ads are taken away for users who simply post? Any social media platforms where users can post and not get ads without paying?
Our servers alone cost around £18k/year.
If you create an Ad Free account you can login and access your account here
Hi Mark, apologies I have been travelling so just checked this out, I will feedback for your reference only I don't expect anything. You can access your account but it is still really odd as a user experience.
Home page has two options View Plans which sounds positive or logout
View plans gives this really odd option
The only place you can see your sub is in transactions but you cannot do anything with this.
It seems like deleting your account is the only way to stop the renewal unless they email a process when the time is nearing.
Deleted
I disagree with all the content comments as the content has been provided by free users and as a reward they should be able to read their content without intrusive tracking and ads.
With all due respect, at 37 posts in two years you're not really in a position to be asking for rewards as a content creator.
Just FYI, We are currently experiencing a massive influx of fake traffic from East Asia that is proving very tricky to block. The volume of traffic is in the many thousands right now and it is likley it will be affecting site performance. I'll update when we've killed it.
I'm sorry but after supporting this forum by paying for it for a number of years and also being a contributor for double that I'm having to become an very occasional visitor only.
These latest changes have really screwed up the non-paying user experience. The sheer volume and intrusiveness of the ads is headache-inducing and completely blocks the view of the content. I just don't visit here anywhere enough to justify paying for it now either as the traffic has dropped off significantly in the last year to 18 months, especially posts and how quickly (or rather slowly) topics cycle through on the main page. I currently have 3 video ads playing while typing this, all flashing away with bright colours to grab my attention plus two that do that annoying zoom in and out thing.
This place will always be thought of fondly, especially for the sheer amazing knowledge and friendliness the users provided over the pandemic and with my struggles as my dad succumbed to cancer around the same time. I've got the mugs I bought when the call went out for help with funds to keep the lights on during that time too, both in regular use. The legendary threads are a highlight too. But there just isn't the draw to here to warrant me paying to sub and without the sub it's borderline unusable. I don't wish anything but good luck to Mark and the team in keeping this going and even improving it, forum and magazine, but sadly I'm out. This isn't a flounce or anything, just constructive advice for the team to use as if people just up and leave without them knowing why then they have no hope of rectifying the issues.
I'll possibly pop in every now and then out of habit and as I know a few users IRL I'll probably hear about things that way too. Thanks to everyone that has been kind, offered advice, encouragement and for all the laughs.
"Autoplay video" is a browser setting, you should be able to turn that off. It's not perfect because some sites / ad providers go out of their way with tricks to bypass it. Whether or not STW's ad provider does so, I don't know.
iPhone - keeps refreshing the page by itself and then get an error message saying ‘ an error keeps repeating’ on a white screen
me too.iPhone - keeps refreshing the page by itself and then get an error message saying ‘ an error keeps repeating’ on a white screen
I know there's that thing about the forum being fast but out of date if you're logged out however...
As of 7:30am today
When logged out, the last post on the Monday metal thread is 5:30pm yesterday
When logged in the last post on the Monday metal thread is 9:09pm yesterday
That's a heck of a 14 hour delay. Is it intentionally so big as to make the forum unappealing to anyone but logged in paying members?
I tend to browse at work logged out, but be logged in on my phone which now makes the site act almost like two different places.
How do you DM someone these days?
I thought it was go to profile & push the button, but as per Cougar's screenshot up there there appears to be no button?
Have tried several browsers disabling all plugins etc & private browsing...
Is it me who's only just noticed it but there's a black immovable circle with a bell in it at the bottom left of my Pixel 7a screen that does nothing except get in the way so I can't read what I'm typing?
Hey, it works, on Firefox, for a freeloader user. I'm not going to say it's great with an AI gif of a woman dribbling water and breathing smoke in an ad for "apnée du sommeil" under this box but it works.
Is it me who's only just noticed it but there's a black immovable circle with a bell in it at the bottom left of my Pixel 7a screen that does nothing except get in the way so I can't read what I'm typing?
That tells you you haave a notification - you cannot click on it tho - you need to go to profile notifications to find out why. Probably a message
As noted by others popups blocking functions makes navigation a chore. The top of page button you can add to those noted above.
We now have no messages rather than 2. Just as well a member gave me their phone number so we can still meet up.
As a first time visitor to the site I'd give up before ever finding there was a forum so new blood is going to very rare.
Looking around other sites using Fiefox with nothing added there's advertising, fine it brings in revenue, but here the advertising is intrusive, dodgy and impedes funtionality. I'm sure that pop up is not really the French government.
A full paywall model no doubt wouldn't work.
A full advertising model wouldn't work either.
You're trying a comprimise, for that comprimise to work the advertising needs to have a little less impact on the user experience IMO.
Junior commented that as I enjoyed using the forum why not pay and support it. The answer is two fold. My sub wouln't save the site, but more importantly many of the users I like and feel affinity with are freeloaders like me. I don't want to be in an exclusive club. I've enjoyed the STW experience for the social variety - far left to far right, libertarian to authoritatian, hard up to affluent.
Anyhow, I persist in the bit of the screen between the averts and see how it goes. Hope it keeps going.
How do you DM someone these days?
I thought it was go to profile & push the button, but as per Cougar's screenshot up there there appears to be no button?
Have tried several browsers disabling all plugins etc & private browsing...
Weird. I can't find any way of messaging
Is anyone else experiencing problems when loading the forum index? It constantly refreshes whilst loading, then the whole site goes white, then it loads the index again, it continues in this cycle for five or six page loads.
Plus the fact the threads/page jumps around as the ads load is very annoying, constantly moves about as you try and click on a topic!