Thank you, that’s good to know. Although I do prefer diagrams, given I can see a decent number of them at once.
Hey, OGS devs, I’ve turned off ad-blocking for this site, such is my love for you all. However, I’ve already seen at least one ad I find extremely offensive (it’s for another horrible dating site and had a picture of a women shoving her butt in my face). Is there anything that can be done about the type of ads that are shown?
Hi Ectopod,
Thanks for disabling ad-block!
I’ve just gone through and turned off a number of “sensitive categories” that should stop those types of ads from showing up. It might take a little bit for that setting to propagate but if you see any other offensive ads after a few hours let me know and I’ll hunt them down.
Thanks for letting us know!
I just got rid of the really wide skyscrapers, hopefully that helps a bit while still being effective.
I understand why you introduced ads, but the way you’re doing it right now is pretty aggressive: advertising panels at the top, and at the left and at the right side. The whole home page looks dominated by ads (rather than by Go) which seems to bring the message that you’re trying to annoy people into supporting you, which I’m sure is not your intention.
On my tablet, it’s even worse: the home page only shows ads (a horizontal one, and a large vertical one in the middle of the page). I have to scroll down to actually see the Go boards. If this would be the first time I visited the GS website with my tablet, I would probably have moved on.
On many other gaming sites I visit (including non-Go sites like Chess) they usually limit the Ads to 1, sometimes 2 sides of the webpage, and they try to generate income from providing nice features for paying customers. Personally I like this approach better.
I’m financially supporting other sites, and I have no problem with supporting GS as well. But, you only offer a recurring payment scheme. Why not also offer a one-time payment option that would make a user a site supporter for X months? The psychology of feeling in control of your own expenses is important for many people. I think that not giving this option makes you lose money.
Having said all this, GS was and still is one of the greatest places to play online Go, and I hope that it will continue to grow, and generate revenue!
Thanks for the quick reply @anoek, I have yet to see another offensive ad. Other than that, I do agree with what @Towerwood says: three ads on the homepage seems like too much and really makes the screen look like a mess.
Regardless, thanks for the work you and the other devs do here, and hopefully this ad business will get streamlined to the point where it is both helpful to you and not too intrusive to the user.
Just became a site supporter and happy to see the ads gone. Pulling up the site on mobile isn’t atrocious anymore. That being said, is there any reason site supporters need to see this message?:
"Please disable Disconnect.me and AdBlockers for this site
(Or better yet, become a site supporter and hide the ads legitimately!)"
It’s still an ad…
You should most definitely not be seeing that once you’re a site supporter. I just checked on my system that it’s not showing up when I have either adblock or disconnect enabled, but it’s very possible there’s something different between our systems that’s causing you to erroneously see the message. Can you try logging out and logging back in on the device you saw this on and let me know if that clears it up for you? If not, can you let me know what browser and what adblocking / privacy addons you have installed? Thanks for the report, sorry for the troubles, and thanks for becoming a site supporter!
It’s gone now, so I’m guessing it was probably just browser cache misbehaving. I should know better, as I have to tell my clients on a daily basis to clear their cache…
I can confirm that I do not see that message as a subscriber. Actually, I was not seeing it when I wasn’t subsrciber either Was that added only recently? I use Pale Moon browser with Adblock Latitude, which is usually recognized by adblocker detectors. Plus NoScript, but OGS itself is white-listed there (the site itself, not any 3rd paty scripts it might use).
It was pretty recent, maybe a couple of days ago? It’s very possible that the detector we have didn’t work on those though, I’ll have to check it out at some point here
Ah, that explains it. I’ve subscribed some 4-5 days ago.
Those can be considered as firefox + regular adblock for most purposes… although Google tends to think otherwise
Thx for all the good work, ads or not, my support all the way .
I am really disappointed. I thought ads on OGS could work. I wanted to support the devs. OGS was a place I liked so why not disable adblock.
The first ad that really annoyed me was for some stupid flash game that cost 4,99 per week. Felt like a trap for school kids.
Then the ads increased not only the banner on top but also on the sides.
OGS was the only website I saw ads on the internet and I didn’t like it. It was distracting, annoying and it felt like an invasion. I felt betrayed because one banner ad was apparently not enough. So almost on autopilot I activated adblock on my main computer again.
I thought it was still okay since I saw ads on my smartphone. But today I activated adblock on my smartphone again. Roughly measured: 44% on my smartphone display were ads. 16% the part I wanted to click on. The rest is UI, etc. That is too much and very annoying.
The good feeling from the beginning is gone. I don’t longer care about supporting the devs. These couple of days really reminded me how bad the internet with ads was. Right now I feel angry. I don’t want to call it greed but having more ads on the starting page than “content” leaves a bad feeling.
Ads are not the solution! They are a cancer. OGS should find a different way.
Well, I’m beginning to be annoyed by the ads as well, so I made my mind and I will become a supporter.
My question to the devs is: How much of my say $ 1 a month (or $ 5, or $ 10 if there’s a difference) gets to you? In other words, how expensive is the transaction provider?
When using a credit card directly there’s currently no transaction fee as the first $50k are free through our payment processor, Braintree - but if someday we exceed that amount then it’ll be 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. For PayPal it’s 5% + $0.05 per transaction.
how do I get in the payment processor business? wow. I didn’t realize how much they get per transaction.
Yeah, it’s more the credit card business that’s a racket, they take the lions share. At least there is competition in the payment processing business…
I’d gladly pay $15 or maybe even $20 per year to be a “supporter” of OGS, but the $5/month ($60 per year) is far too much. And no, I won’t stop using Adblock.
OGS is a very nice site and I appreciate it and would pay a little bit for it, but you have to realize that you’re competing against “free”.