Some of you have already noticed "green links" that appeared on our forums two weeks ago and have been visible on threads ever since. I've already addressed this issue in separate thread, but lets make it to the announcement section as well. First of all, apologies for not announcing this officially, but are testing this system and as we don't know what turn we will take this, we considered an "official" announcement slightly premature. But as some people have expressed their concern over these, lets address it now. The "green links" are ads from IntelliTXT / VibrantMedia. They are not spyware, they wont install anything on your comp or browser, they simply do the same as AdSense (the Gooooogle ads) do, analyze the page content and add links to "keywords" that pay then us some money if people click on them. We've had them for 2 years or so on our news section and we're testing them now on forums. Couple of pointers: 1) They are not "adware" or "spyware", just ads. For more info: http://www.scumware.com/apps/scumware.php/action::view_article/ar... 2) If you haven't noticed, they appear only on the first and last post on each page, to minimize the clutter. 3) If you are logged in, you wont see them, whether you are newbie or Addict. 4) In case you haven't noticed, we've removed our popunders and interstitials from our forums and try to evaluate whether this ad format (which we feel, is less annoying) could compensate this at least partially. 5) If the test works out, we'll remove pops from all our sites. 6) We'll add shortly a clear statement above thread pages stating "The green links are ads! The blue links are either links posted by our users or links to AfterDawn's relevant pages". Feedback is appreciated.
they can get very annoying sometimes......i know i'll remove my glasses and this is what happens... l8tr ulllllll
Not a prob dRD. You've got to pay those bills somehow. I'm just thankful that you don't charge me by the word, in which case, I would have to choose between being broke or shutting-up. Not an easy call to make at all!
Ahhh... so thats what they are.... yeah i always see them on other sites like news sites and tech sites..... well its good to know whats happening... thanks dRD
andmerr: Work? As in what way? They do show up whether your browser is IE, FFox or Safari, as long as your JScript is on, but as stated above, if you're logged in, they don't show up.
actually sorry dRD i should of explained a bit more.I was wondering do they actually work as in generating income.
andmerr: Well, its slightly too early to evaluate it, as we've been running them only for 2-3 weeks now, but they do seem to offset most of the loss caused by the removal of pops. We also hope that by removing pops, some users, who might have been turned away from our site due pops, would come back and continue using the forums, thus generating higher "user stickiness" to the site, which would eventually more than offset the loss caused by removal of pops. Yes, running a website and trying to make it grow is rocket science at times
Trust me, there is plenty of user stickiness already. I find myself on here at every available internet connection. Ah well, don't stop 'till you're shifting more that google The sky is the limit.
Lethal_B: Heh, wont be stopping, trust me We still have plenty of stuff that we plan to add to the site in order to improve its usefulness. One thing tho, there's one really nerve-wrecking thing on our forums that I'd love to hear some suggestions for (from everybody): People who use our forums, never tend to make their way to our main site. Sure, hardcore users do, some people visit news headlines via the little box available at the bottom of long threads, etc. But I still do see this quite often that people post threads like "New version of Software X available!!" and have a changelog pasted there and a link to the tool's homepage -- whereas, the software has been available via our site for N days by then... Same goes for news, people post copy/paste'd news to our forums that are already headline news on our main page. Suggestions on how to improve the situation are welcomed One thing I've been thinking about is to re-introduce the sidebar (that is avail on most of the www.afterdawn.com's pages) to forums as well, but as it would take 160px or so from the forum content, I'm not sure whether its a good idea or not..
thats worth trying drd and a pretty good idea as well. Wondering if you could give Filepedia a bigger heading some where as newbies etc still dont utilse it to its fullest potential.Still get people asking where it is or where to get software with trials from etc. i did suggest you utilise a phpbb setup with the images, etc where instead of typing it all the time we can just push a button that will put
dRD - To be perfectly honest (I know you would rather have an honest opinion than not), I don't really think a sidebar is the answer to the news updates not being noticed, because, as you say, it makes for less forum space, which I don't feel will be favourable with the members. If a sidebar were to be introduced, I feel that It wouldn't stop the people who post news already reported from continuing to do so.. A suggestion could be to have a thread in each forum linking to each new report (relating to that topic) as it is published. That way, people who may have, say, [bold]Nero[/bold] news can look in the "news" thread in the Nero forum & see that it has already been reported, thus preventing anyone reprinting it.
@i_suck If you are logged in you aren't supposed to see anything...if I'm reading right. @Lethal I think that is a good idea, sticky the relevant news in each forum. @andmerr Also a good idea as you know, we all to our fair share of quoting and image insertion.
Now I understand. Certainly annoying when one is not logged in. Hope that they generate the income needed. I love this site.
