Thread: Take my money! Please!

Originally Posted by sharptonn

A side effect. If you set up for no side ads and go to your home page, everything on the left side is gone. Latest posts, started threads, friends. You gotta restore the SRP default to see it. Still free, though!

Yeah.
The way the ad software works is unfriendly to CSS. I put the no side ads together as a quick fix with the intention of really doing something about it when I have time.
For now you'll have to switch back and forth between the themes if you don't want ads.

Originally Posted by unit

I have said it before and I will offer to vote with my wallet again!

These latest advertisements with the flashing buttons (that frankly, scare me, as they look like popups that will perhaps load mal-ware for me) has me saying it again.

If site administration offered a paid membership that had a sole benefit of removing the ads, I would be all over it!

Thanks

Not going to happen at this moment. Dealing with money is a pain.
As soon as you offer service for money, things get murky from a legal and fiscal point of view.
Probably nothing that an accountant and a lawyer can't figure out, but that is going to cost money as well, and will still be a hassle.

And then there is the whole 'you're only doing this to get money' / 'you decided to do X or promote Y for your bottom line' spiel that is just baloney. But as you yourself said 'for the sole benefit of removing the ads' is a very complex requirement. The ads generate some amount of revenue. I have no clue how much, but it won't be that much, considering the fact that we a) restrict the type of ad, and b) have a limited amount of views.

Still, it is enough to pay the bills. Or at least I am not paying anything to get this site going
Suppose we go with your proposal and you are the only one using this feature. Then it is simple: I charge you the loss of income, and we're ok. But it is not just you. I would need to divide it between an unknown amount of people. The number will vary throughout the year. So how much do I charge? I need the money up front to renew the domain name, pay for VB, etc.

So I need to come up with a reasonable fee, based on the expected number of members who'd pay.
Inevitably, I'd either come up short (in which case I have a problem) or I have a surplus.
If I have a surplus, what do I do with it? spend it on other things that could use improving (such as the classifieds system) or do I refund? Additionally, people would renew their registration at various time throughout the year, and our costs are spread as well, so there is never a clear moment when you can make a balance with the goal of making sure that your money only goes to the removal of advertizing.

The only way to make such a scheme work is to charge a fixed fee for a fixed set of 'improvements' (such as no advertizing, or more PMs or whatever) without needing to justify whatever we spent it on.

And that's something we are not doing at present.