[Closed] Ads - new complaint

I wonder how much traffic there would be if the "freeloaders" had a viable alternative? A damn sight less I imagine. Funny how so many sites manage to survive on donations and a couple of top banner ads (Descent World and SDH at their height managed to get by rather well) yet a supposed business venture can't scrape enough cash together to keep going so floods users with shite to keep the pennies rolling in.

(Descent World and SDH at their height managed to get by rather well)

The "glory days" of sites like that were prior to the major publishers putting much effort into the online side of things. As long as you got your results and reports up in a couple of weeks you were going to beat the publishers to it, so it was easy for a group of volunteers to run a successful site. Now most of the biggest names in cycling journalism are being paid to write for online sites, so the bills stack up.

DW was reliant on an army of volunteers to produce content and manage the upkeep. I sunk hundreds of hours and pounds into it myself for nothing more than the love of it and the free kit for reviews. The income from ads paid for the hosting and I think I got a couple of hundred quid towards flights to Leogang one year, not that I begrudge it at all, but it's not comparable to the current situation which requires significantly more income not just to pay for the production of content, but hosting, design etc.

Consider also the scale, obviously I know the DW stats of yesteryear and working in the online advertising industry I have access to some of the stats for the current crop of MTB sites. These days you are talking about sites that are bigger by a factory of 20, 30, 40 times! It's total apples and pears.

As Tenacious Doug says - huge difference between an "enthusiasts site" that exists on free content and just needs to cover hosting costs, and an actual business that has to (and rightly should) pay wages. Sadly this is one of the disconnects in modern times where people don't want to pay for content (either directly or by being sold as an audience to advertisers), yet somehow expect people to put in time, resource etc to create the content.

I fully support the owners making as much money as possible to pay wages and not have to shed staff/contributors due to not enough revenue. If there's the odd rogue ad, that's just one of those things. In the scheme of things it's not really a big hardship.

Precisely you two there is no comparison between DW and here cost wise.

I'm sure Tommy, Jon and Ian would see the funny side.

That's in the new version of the ...

They managed to create a 'new' one for Grit.cx. The problem is that i suspect that Grit has sucked up a lot of time and money, with the resulting noticable impact on here.

You're frustrated at fielding complaints about how abysmally crap and intrusive the ad experience is here?

Boo bloody hoo. Perhaps if someone listened and fixed it, there wouldn't be so many complaints.

I'd like to thank Cougar for putting his head above the parapet and answering questions, and, yes, it might be a good idea for a thread like this to be a sticky.

In the end this place is a consumer choice, but lucky to be one with little competition perhaps?

With 500,000 Facebook likes, or whatever it is, a lot of traffic, and a magazine that seems to do ok, there must be a way to be more selective and intelligent about the way the ads are presented. And also fix the logout thing. We shouldn't need to use Cougars link or ad blockers.

+1

The ads and logging out let down an otherwise great site.

I've had to resort to using an adblocker on the phone to read the site as it sucks so much data per page loading all the ads, also really clogs up the RAM too after a few pages. Don't know another site like it!! Even the crap BikeRadar site works better 😐

On the laptop at home I don't have a problem as my connection speed is so slow that the ads never get a chance to fully load although I do notice the ridiculous amount of ad-tracking things that try to load up, 20 or so last time I checked. Considering this forum is one of the simpler ones out there (two sub-forums, mostly text with no avatars or other stuff, part of it's attraction) it's amazing how much data it sucks up to load one sodding page!

Sounds like this is the Facebook of bike forums...the data being captured could be sold to fund vast improvements (and reduce the number of complaints)...

how abysmally crap and intrusive the ad experience is here

just sat here reading the maserati recall thread, and knowing how it happens on here, its now becoming a bit of a joke brand due to the big ad.....

is this actually a ( very small) backfire for them? yeah i know realistically we werent gonna buy one anyway, but if google brings up stw threads slagging them off and in our little world theyre just one big joke, is this a negative? or is it really as they say, no such thing as bad publicity?

I was going to reply to this thread, but just got a redirect to William Hill app on iOS app store 🙁

is this actually a ( very small) backfire for them? yeah i know realistically we werent gonna buy one anyway, but if google brings up stw threads slagging them off and in our little world theyre just one big joke, is this a negative? or is it really as they say, no such thing as bad publicity?

[IMG] [/IMG]

i know realistically we werent gonna buy one anyway

Sadly this is one of the disconnects in modern times where people don't want to pay for content

But I do pay for it. In fact, it is about the only web content that I do pay for, apart from BBC via Licence Fee.

Anyway, I use the site much less now than I did in the past because of exactly the reasons covered in this, and numerous other, threads.

- Log out issue affect all of my browsers and devices, every day.
- Log-in button is the last thing to load, it can take up to 3 minutes before I can click it
- Maserati add is huge and when I hit the x, I get taken through the the page of the ad that sits behind it.

The log-in workaround helps, but it is still exactly that, a workaround.

Yeah, there are two issues here and they are being conflated. Anyone paying for an ad-free experience should expect it to work. As I've already said, there should be some sort of error reporting button to collect some user data in order to develop a fix or to highlight what settings etc are causing the problem (could be a ducks-on-water thing going on where STW towers are hard at work but we're not seeing it).

Having said that, maybe if more folk subscribed there would be more money to finance that investigation. It's a bit chicken-and-egg though as who would subscribe knowing they might still have problems?

Anyone paying for an ad-free experience should expect it to work.

....and don't forget those non-Ps who have considered going full P, but don't because of the issues described by current Ps.

I need a pee now. brb.

Having said that, maybe if more folk subscribed there would be more money to finance that investigation.

Or cull grit.cx.

I'm a big 'P' and I don't have any problems on Mac or iPhone using Firefox on Mac and using Google as my default search thingy.

- Log out issue affect all of my browsers and devices, every day.

So the million dollar question here is, what's common to all of your browsers but different from most other users (like, as a random example, me) who get logged out around once or twice a month?

....and don't forget those non-Ps who have considered going full P, but don't because of the issues described by current Ps.

I've worked in and around support for a couple of decades, and if I had a pound for for every time I'd heard variations on "I've never spent any money, but I was about to and now I'm not" I could afford to buy out GoFar and rewrite the forum myself.

So the million dollar question here is, what's common to all of your browsers but different from most other users (like, as a random example, me) who get logged out around once or twice a month?

Chrome at work on PC
Safari at home on iPad
Chrome on Android phone
IE on work PC

Not a lot in common there.

Any plugins / addons? Any other software running that might be frobbing your cookies (so to speak)?

You see Cougar, this is the problem; you are trying to get to the bottom of it in a piecemeal manner, often asking questions the users may not even know the answer to (or worse, think they do but don't). I know you are trying to help, so it's not a dig at you, but it really does need some more accurate and reliable method of problem determination.

I would consider subscribing but if I'm paying I expect a decent modern forum, of which this is neither. You couldn't even put it in the same century to be honest as DW was a far better forum when I joined in 2002.

Doug & Andy - I wasn't comparing STW content to DW or SDH, sorry for not making that clearer. I was referring to the forums on a pure like for like basis. STW, of course, is a business and its content should be paying for itself through mags. As far as I'm concerned the forums are nothing more than publicity, giving people a reason to get in the door so to speak. It's not a community first and foremost and I realise its business model is different but that still doesn't excuse the complete lack of communication or effort by the tech staff beyond Mark coming on once in a blue moon to tell us we're all wrong.

Put it this way, here's some off the shelf forum software that a forum of mostly 18-25yo gamers managed to afford last week when our site crashed jsut from ewxisting donation funds:

https://xenforo.com/purchase/

$190 for the forum software plus enhanced search, $440 if you wanted the copyright branding removed. With a bit of effort it could be rolled out in a month allowing for normal work schedules and the fact it's not an emergency restoration (we did it in about 3 days using 3 people starting the entire site and backend including sourcing a new server from scratch as there were no backups since the passwords were in the wind). That's small change or certainly should be for what is arguably the biggest draw to your business.

Any plugins / addons? Any other software running that might be frobbing your cookies (so to speak)?

Not that I know of, but I'm no expert.

Not sure what Frobbing is and reluctant to Google it at work, it sound [i]specialist[/i]

So the million dollar question here is, what's common to all of your browsers but different from most other users (like, as a random example, me) who get logged out around once or twice a month?

So here we go again, logging out every session on:

IE8 on XP SP3+ (no extensions, corporate adblocking, don't expect too much on this front to be honest)
FF on Windows 10 (+ ABP and Private Tab)
Safari on IOS 7something (no extensions)

It seems to be holding on IE on Windows Phone 8.1

Always logged me out every time you close the browser down irrelevant of browser or operating system (Chrome & Firefox on WIn 7, Vista and 10, also Chrome on Android). It doesn't bother me much on the desktop as it is easy to log back in, but on a phone it is a miserable experience.

I've worked in and around support for a couple of decades, and if I had a pound for for every time I'd heard variations on "I've never spent any money, but I was about to and now I'm not" I could afford to buy out GoFar and rewrite the forum myself.

Pithy as always, Cougar, but I think I make a valid point. If you have current Premier subscribers stating that the experience is less than Premier it will deter some folks from signing up.

Put it this way, here's some off the shelf forum software that a forum of mostly 18-25yo gamers managed to afford last week when our site crashed jsut from ewxisting donation funds:

Forum software is not that expensive, vBulletin is only a couple of 100 $s, and bigger forums like Overclockers have been running it untouched for years. I think the biggest reason STW is still on a hacky wordpress code, is moving the database. They committed to the wrong platform, and it's just snowballed from there.