Ads?

[Maeve]

Alright- so it looks like it's time again to get the boards ad-free.

All those in favor say "Aye!"

I'm willing to help pitch-in to get the eyesores gone.

[Chris]

I applied a few creds to Jan and it cleard right up nicely even though it's still technically December.

[Jonathan Baxter]

Ads are showing up again...

[Desmodus]

AdBlocker?

[Webmonkey]

These boards are 'free with ads'. AdBlocker is a violation of the terms of service to use Proboards. The reason that people don't see ads is that others donate $7 for every 50,000 clicks of 'ad free' views. This is seperate from NOTR funds collections or collections for specific sphere events, since it's purely a convienience.

These expire, used or not each month. We had 7 credits/$ left that had not been applied to a month - I've now applied them to the boards, so our credit balance is zero. Please see the thread "Ad Free? Well not quite free" for more details and information on contributing if you'd like.

Thanks,

- Chrismonkey

[Jonathan Baxter]

Do we have plans of moving to a free forum, such as www.phpbb3now.com/ ?

[Webmonkey]

I've looked at that site, and at several reviews from the board admin communities I'm apart of. The bottom line with them is that they're relatively new to the field (about a year/2 old) and they are a venture capital seeking company - meaning they're trying to prove usership so that they can move to a paid model.

The lesson: Nothing is free (for long).

They also lack a lot of the features of these boards. v5 (of Proboards) is in alpha right now and has unparralelled interactivity. It's the hotness.

There's also the matter of a couple of hundred hours of tweaking, customization and modification of these boards I've done which I'm not *super* excited about returning to scratch on. That alone wouldn't stop me from considering alternatives though. Just groaning about them.

The developer and mod community for Proboards is truly awesome. I have lots of cool custom code that I've been able to wrangle from other developers. The phpbb3now development community is weak by comparison. It's like comparing the # of apps on iPhone to the ones on WindowsPhone. No contest.

But like I said, they're new-ish.

Our boards are free, but they do have ads - that is a pretty minor inconvienience, which can be 'purchased away' but there's no impetus to do so unless you care. Really though, you do see ads everywhere... so it's a purely asthetic conceit. I've never seen pop-ups or loud 'COngratulations, youve just one a free iBlah' one from these ads.

The one thing I definitely don't like about Proboards though, is that old posts stop being 'searchable' after awhile. If you saved the link to an old post, you can go back forever, but you can't search for it. After a certain number of days in the past, the servers will just refuse to return results. That annoys me quite a bit, especially since I tend to write IC posts as 'chapters' of a story. So I know to just create a side file with my post urls so I can create a digest post later if I want linking to all the stories for a character.

I mean, I get it, there are tens of thousands of IC posts, and a by word search query on a database of that much info would drag every other board on our server into the dirt performance wise, but it still annoys me. I'd much rather pay for a 'forever searchable' board solution than get a free one just because it didn't have ads any day.

Quality over quantity type-thing.

Anyway, that's my thought about the matter.

[Jonathan Baxter]

Thanks for the reply!

[Webmonkey]

No worries. As you can see I am That Nerd who likes to discuss these types of things.

[Desmodus]

Does the NOTR donations also cover website costs? I know that it covers the necessary stuff to run the game, (mainly rent for B&GC, right?) but would this be covered as well? If not, where can we turn in donations in person?

[Webmonkey]

May 4, 2011 10:48:43 GMT -8 Desmodus said:

Does the NOTR donations also cover website costs? I know that it covers the necessary stuff to run the game, (mainly rent for B&GC, right?) but would this be covered as well? If not, where can we turn in donations in person?

Starting a month or so ago, they have opted to start donating some funds to reimburse me for 'hard website costs' such as hosting the non-free sites. I didn't include the 'Ad Free' $ for the Proboards in my list of website costs because it is completely voluntary/non compulsory however.