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The ads are killing me on here.
Far to many trackers and Firefox blocks evetything.
Cheers for now. STW will have to go on the back burner for a bit.
RT
taking-a-break
Giving us two fingers?
‘Yet another place where ads are used as an incentive to make you pay more. When will this culture of ads **** off? The only purpose they serve is to piss people off! No-one buys anything advertised by a punishment ad! 😡😡😡
Yep, I dont even load it up at work anymore because it wont open unless I turn off adblocker, it's almost completely unusable on my macbook as well so it's rare I even look of an evening.
‘Yet another place where ads are used as an incentive to make you pay more. When will this culture of ads **** off? The only purpose they serve is to piss people off! No-one buys anything advertised by a punishment ad! 😡😡😡
But the site gets revenue and that is what keeps its infrastructure alive along with us paying punters.
If all the free members clear off the site will die.
If the advertising revenue doesn't match the gap between full member income and operating costs the site will die
More fairly (imo) the advertising is not there to incentivise someone to pay it is there because some people choose not to pay.
I pay because I value STW and the articles enough to shell out a small amount each year. If my screen was smashed with ads I might feel differently as a paying member.
If I got value from the site but not enough to pay then I would accept I have to live with the ads or stop using the site. This is my approach to road.cc. I suspect this place is equally ugly with the ads as that.
If the ads go too far then users go.
If they don't go far enough then the site goes.
#redthunder - I hope you come back for Inktober!
(And yes the site is unusable for non-members, I no longer share posts with friends or family as it generates so much frustration and anger.)
Yeah the ads make me want to go willfully blind, it's like a throwback to the 90s getting your pc riddled with adware visiting here. I'm against ads on all platforms and most of my phone apps are custom APKs with no ads built in as well as other features, Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, reddit, Spotify premium, strava premium for free etc.
I've managed to find a way of accessing the site without ads as a free member but have suffered some clunky UI as a result, but hey it's worth it. Everytime I forget to use it in quickly reminded it's worth the hassle of messing about to avoid them
An annual digital sub is 30.99 or £0.60/week.
More fairly (imo) the advertising is not there to incentivise someone to pay it is there because some people choose not to pay.
Same thing isn’t it? You know what I’m saying, they serve no other purpose other than being ****ing annoying. So you pay to get rid of them. STW does give extras on top of the killing of adverts, so its not quite the same as, for example, ITVX, but the ads are still just used as an irritant.
disgraceful, y'all should demand a refund!
As Mark says above. £31 for a year. £0.60 per week. Less than 10p per day.
Keeps this forum rolling, keeps the community alive and keeps all those good for nothing journos in a job.
Having seen the slow demise of my previous internet home (Boards Magazines Forum) I am more than happy to pay for a digital subscription to keep this ship afloat.
I'm still a paid member but it's not worth it if the fun has gone out of the forum. You can tell people are staying away. I used to be logged in all day at work and now I don't bother.
I know a balance has to be struck but making the user experience miserable will just drive people away, not convert them into paid members.
Even without the ads there's the broken formatting, random text colours and font sizes. Half the time I type something, hit 'add reply', get the spinning blue wheel and then nothing. No post, just a waste of time.
The whole thing feels borked.
An annual digital sub is 30.99 or £0.60/week.
Yet I've had to fully cancel my 'paused' magazine + digital subscription before I get any option to do a digital subscription....
I am back at that place where I'm torn over wether to subscribe or not. It's been 18 months of fundraising and more, finally the forum has improved, but it's slowing down in numbers of posters and interactions so much I'm wondering if it's worth it anymore.
Same thing isn’t it? You know what I’m saying, they serve no other purpose other than being ****ing annoying.
I totally get the perception from the user side but there is a critical purpose that is not about annoying people.
It's the NO purpose (my emphasis) that I thought was unfair.
The useful purpose is providing STW with an income indirectly from those who choose to visit the site and do not pay for a sub.
The user is still paying nothing but the site is still getting paid.
I'm sure the ads are annoying and I don't know what value they generate directly or indirectly for the advertisers but for STW the cash they get from them is part of the site's survival, without them everyone would have to pay or the site would close.
So eatmorepizza your solution is for the site to be entirely funded by the subscribers like me, whilst you browse for free?
I can't use the site on my PC as it says I'm using an ad blocker even when it's definitely disabled - so I'm left with just my phone screen full of adverts.
The result is that I come here much less often, and because the post numbers are seemingly dwindling, anyway, I suspect I will visit here less and less.
It's a shame.
I get the need to monetise non-subscribers in some way, and also the irritant/incentivisation angle.
But through a combination of shonkiness, the irritant reducing the participation, and other factors including toxicity of some posters, to me there isn't the sense of community there was and that's what will I'm afraid kill this in the end.
(JV, bought paper mag issue 2, subscriber since, helped with bike builds in the past when needed, paid car tax for a year for the car this community donated to a member in significant need, so I don't consider myself a freeloader overall. But I dropped it a year ago because of the above. 25000 odd posts and 10/10 fwiw)
Far to many trackers and Firefox blocks evetything.
If Firefox is blocking everything then what's the issue?
Genuine question.
Ultimately, STW is a business. It has to pay actual salaries or the lights go out.
I have a high degree of confidence that the ads aren't deliberately placed to be annoying in order to bully people into subscribing. Not least because that would be a bloody stupid thing to do, and for any of Mark's other perceived or actual faults "bloody stupid" is not one of them.
Mark is on record as saying that if he could afford to switch them off, he would do. He hates them at least as much as we do, but they're a necessary evil. You can argue "it doesn't work" all you like but it plainly does or it wouldn't exist. Advertisers aren't going to invest vast amounts of money in advertising if they didn't see a return. That's even more bloody stupid.