I find ads that run in a sidebar are easy to ignore. Popups are another matter and I don’t allow those. Virtually every forum has ads and frankly they help support this hobby, when they clicked on, as well as those forums dedicated to my other desires. We can all adjust our email preferences, too. That comes along with the relatively low cost of using the internet and the ease of interacting with so much and so many other people.
Thought regarding saving your bandwidth use by not permitting ads to run on your computer… you also save the advertiser money (bandwidth) when you block an ad. Their server no longer has to serve up the ad if it can’t run on your machine. So ad blocking saves the advertiser money.
Interesting comment. I use ABP on all my machines for years and they seem to all run fine. My main rig is an i7, though. So that probably overcomes any processing inefficiencies.
I’m always using laptops over wifi, so they ain’t exactly gaming machines, and it ain’t direct-wire speed.
On firing up, FF goes out to the web and gets all the “packages” that you checked off in ABP, and grabs them locally. On a slower machine over a slower connection, you can just wait and wait and wait.
Plus, all the inline processing off “bad” addresses also takes its toll.
So yeah, on a fast desktop with wired connection, it’d be passably fast, but if not, it’s painful.
I got a free 3mo promo when I got my car, and now they just won’t leave me alone. Snailmail letters are one thing, even emails are another, but they keep f’n calling me on my phone, and won’t let up. “We want you back!”
Now? I wouldn’t sign up with ’em even if they offered me service for free.
And as a rule, I never ever buy anything from an unsolicited ad (email or snailmail).
Did you get in on the class action lawsuit against them? I got a little bit of money because of the unsolicited calls that they were making to my cell phone. I don’t know what I did but I have never heard from them for the past several years.
Steamer is a long time member and doesn't want SB shorted in revenues that help run this forum. He is clearly talking about threads and not ads. It does seem that every time GB offers a deal, the same deal shows up in another GB thread and in at least 2 other affiliated GB deal threads. I can understand the frustration as BLF has a very different feel from it's earlier days. Ironically, that earlier feel is a good part of why it is so successful today.
4 Wheeler understood exactly what I felt. I had regretted posting this thread when I realized the can of worms I had opened. So I hesitated to even respond to my own thread
The banner page was not what I was referring to. It was the GearBest thread loaded everyday to the hilt with their offerings. Silly of me, I know. Going down Memory Lane can mess with the senses at times. Even Old Lumens ranted about what I am referring to.
Well, time for me to move on and accept the forum for what it really is. It is a great forum and I enjoy it immensely. Just got to thinking about the past, that’s all. Thanks to all for letting me vent.
