Cool I’ll add it to the list of services to check out and see if we can integrate with them
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Hello!
I love your work, therefore I support your decision to dedicate more manhours through the use of ads. (Although I hate ads in general, and now that they are online I see how they are destroying the clean interface I got used to.)
I’ve seen a neat idea on several sites. Some sites can detect an adblocker and inform you that you are taking away their profits. Some are doing it with annoying pop-ups (and I’m visiting such sites no more), some are doing it with an image placed under the ad (so when the ad is blocked, the image is seen) urging one to support directly (preferably with some in-jokes as someone suggested before). This genuinely caught my attention and I turned the adblock off for such sites.
However, I urge you to widen the options how to support you directly and safely.
Good luck!
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I can move money from ebay to paypal without a credit card so I am going to try selling some stuff there to get the support money.
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There will always be some that will not accept any ads.
I would prefer to not have them, but I accept that not all service providers on the 'Net are able to provide services I enjoy for free. There needs to be some income.
I am a supporter, so I don’t get directly impacted with this. However, if there was enough income from support, there would be no need for ads.
I will be sorry to see folks go, but you can’t please everyone.
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In principle, I think, I am one of those 
and there are very few sites for which I turn off my ad blockers (yes, plural; AND tracker blockers and such). Almost every site which forces me to turn them off won’t be visited any further since most information is accessible on other channels as well.
However, there also are sites which actually are services—that is: they serve me, and well!—for which I happily pay a minor amount for the great amount of fun and/or information that they give me.
I paid a little amount for kaya.gs (remember?), and I regularly pay a little amount for OGS because I want to liberate our devs from a daily 9-to-5 job, I want them to be free to do what they apparently love to do and what they apparently do well.
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One issue with the ads that I’ve noticed is that the ad size does not take the viewport into consideration. At least, not on my Lumia 640 running Windows Phone 10 preview.
The ad banner is about twice the width of an active board, and because the viewport is now wider than the board it’s easy to accidentally resize the screen slightly.
Any zoom level, in or out, causes extreme problems in placing stones correctly - sometimes creating the inability to place any stone at all.
On a possibly unrelated note, I’m also seeing regular difficulty with the button to move backwards through the game history or analyze mode, which wasn’t an issue prior to ads appearing.
On a final note, as a supporter, are ads removed entirely? As in, the site isn’t delayed in rendering by waiting for the ad script to load? Or does the ad script still ruin site responsiveness and then the ad region is just {display:none;}? (if the former then I’m willing to be a site supporter, if the latter then not at all)
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I’m a supporter and haven’t seen any change in response time after ads were implemented. Every thing loads as quickly as before.
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The ad placement / loading code is not executed, thus they are never downloaded nor rendered when you’re a site supporter. (Actually doing so would be a violation of our ad publisher agreement since simply hiding them would still count as an impression, so not only do we not do this, but you have a firm guarantee that we would never do that 
)
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Was that an intentional css twist? Currently it’s only possible to see two board previews at the same time. A few days ago the “supporter” note wasn’t copied three times, and only shown up right below the banner.
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Experimenting with skyscraper ads, for whatever reason it takes a long time for google to start filling the ad spaces though…
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Wow beggars for money. Sory not feeling to support half baked crummy projects. Do a better job. If you want people to support you. Usually great works asks for itself to be payed. Begging for it is kinda offturn.
Those start to feel intrusive. The main problem is the screen width: of all my devices only 1 has screen wide enough to show 3 diagrams in a row (together with the ads). And with 2 (or even 1 like on the shot above) diagrams per row the list becomes ridiculously long even if I do not play that many games.
If you’re serious about keeping skyscraper ads, I’d prefer the games to be listed in plain text format so some 20 of them could actually fit on a screen.
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There is a setting that enables games to be listed in plain text format. It is my preferred setting.
Under Settings/Site Preferences: Game list instead of board thumbnails
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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?
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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!
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I just got rid of the really wide skyscrapers, hopefully that helps a bit while still being effective.
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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!
9 Likes