New ads on the site: Good or bad?

[chump2877]

Hi everyone,

As per my last email to forum members, the new ads are up on the site.

Please let me know if any of the ads or the anti-adblock message is too invasive or disruptive to the user experience.

If so, I will remove ads or make modifications to ad placement to better accommodate you.

Thank you!

[deathshadow]

The crappy anti-adblock fires even when I disable my adblock. I had to use reeks anti-adblock-blocker to kill it.

I think that might be from Ghostery killing the goofball tracking scripts that seem to drag the site's performance into the 9th ring of hell, a likely contributor to why normal users don't bother even logging in here.

The sheer volume of "Crap blocking" I have to run to even make this site tolerable is really absurd. People who don't know how to fix things with Tampermonkey, Stylus, Ghostery, and Adblock Plus likely bounce before this site even finishes loading.

Though it's cool you can put advertising in whilst trying to post code blocks is still busted. Though to be fair that's the garbage that is vBull's fault since it seems every damned site that's running vBulletin has that now.

Could be worse, could be the bizarro "backspace deletes all blank lines between paragraphs" that's cropped up on a few other vBull forums thanks to a rubbish editor mod that allows the use of markdown.

[deathshadow]

Ok, yeah. In firefox where I have no adblock installed whatsoever, that "ad blocker detected" BS still shows up. Normally I use vivaldi. NOT that I'm seeing ads on any pages in either browser. Hah, wonder if my ISP is blocking them which would say all sorts of wonderful things about who you're using for ads.

And yeah, the page load without blockers is painful. 15 second plus for what with blockers in Vivaldi is near instant.

This is why I trust online advertisers about as far as I could throw the USS Iowa. I'm probably a week or two out from redoing my own website and ripping out every single damned adsense link.

[chump2877]

Thank you for your colorful feedback. 😛

The crappy anti-adblock fires even when I disable my adblock.

In firefox where I have no adblock installed whatsoever, that "ad blocker detected" BS still shows up.

I was not able to reproduce this. I did not uninstall AdBlock, but I did test in Chrome Incognito Mode and Firefox Safe Mode. The default behavior of both is to disable all browser extensions. In both cases, I saw the site with ads enabled.

So, if you can provide me with the means to reproduce this, then I can certainly investigate further.

Hah, wonder if my ISP is blocking them which would say all sorts of wonderful things about who you're using for ads.

We're only using Google AdSense currently. If you're somehow able to identify the offending ads, then I believe that there is a way for me to report those advertisers and ads to Google.

And yeah, the page load without blockers is painful. 15 second plus for what with blockers in Vivaldi is near instant.

I do know that browser extensions often increase page load time. So, disabling all of them prior to testing performance is recommended.

image.png

Chrome Dev Tools (via Incognito Mode) shows that the DOM is loaded at 1.63 seconds and page load completes at 5.7 seconds. That does not seem so bad given any potentially "bloated" dependencies loaded by vBulletin and/or Google AdSense.

image.png

Lighthouse run in Chrome (via Incognito Mode) shows a respectable 86/100 for performance. In general, this means that critical content (that enables website interaction/engagement) is loading relatively quickly, even if total page load time takes longer.

[deathshadow]

Excuse the delay in replying, but I don't know if you change anything in the past week, but it had gotten so bad on load times I gave up on this site. It was as bad as when the previous owners did all sorts of advertising and money-making dirtbaggery like when they added the miner script. Cache empty it's still a nightmare, but once populated it seems at least usable now.

Well, fine as a near empty forums can be.

Your analysis methodology of the site speed is flawed. "Fast for you" or "fast for me" or "fast for google" means diddly squat, as with those numbers it WILL be slow for someone at some point. In fact, you highlighted the wrong numbers entirely. The BIG thing to look at?

image.png
THAT is freaking absurd. As if the filesizes aren't absolutely insane for what is for all intents and purposes a nearly 100% text driven site, the file counts are the real issue! And of course that's counting gz compression, which at around 5 freaking megabytes before unpacking means the server and client are bogged down on that alone.

But really, those file counts. That could be for many users well over TWO MINUTES for the page to load. If you live in magical fairy-tale land where HTTP 2 push actually works, your connection limits aren't choked out, you're sitting on top of the server, etc, etm. you might see little to no overhead. "real world" with "real users" the norm is 200ms per file past the first 8 on a cache empty first-load, and a full on second worst-case before you start seeing timeout errors. Thus "normal people" on "normal connections" -- at least in the US where most households share one lousy cable internet connect topping out at 15mbps but with horrifically slow ping -- we're talking over 27 seconds of overhead JUST for handshaking all those pointless bloated extra files!

Mind you, that's typical for the overpriced dung heap vBull has morphed into.

I mean Christmas on a cracker, look at the main index of the forums. Pulling it up in FF here so we can see the real sizes and the gz sizes JUST the HTML, CSS, and JS

image.png
Again that's filtered to just the code. 3.31 megabytes in 53 separate files to deliver a forum index of 5.3k of plaintext, four dozen links, and not a single content media element? That is ineptitude, ignorance, and incompetence (on the part of vBull's developers) of the highest order... quite literally more than 40 times the code needed to do the job. Seriously, that's 3.31 megs of JS, CSS, and HTML spread out over hundreds of files doing the job of around 64-96k of code in a half dozen or less.

Slopping some advertising rubbish on top of that? Not helping. And I would not be surprised if that's a major contributor to the lack of traffic here now. I wonder how many people just give up assuming the site is broken before it even has a chance to load.

Also that advert placement would make small screen users think the site is nothing but an advertisement, what with content pushed below the fold on my tablet and netbook.

[deathshadow]

For reference, this is the important data for all the files, not just the code:
image.png
And that load time is on my nice fresh gigabit fiber. Thing is I'm in west b*****k New Hampshire where I'm seeing 500-600ms ping times to your hosting, thus those endless garbage separate requests -- for NOTHING -- are killing me.

Which is why some of you may have noticed I've not been around as much until today when boom, magically things are better enough to at least be usable once you get over the hump of the first-load.

[judgedredd]

I was going to start a new thread called 'What's with all the garbage ads on this site?'. But then I saw this thread.

I've got a few questions for you admins...

WHY did someone decide to put ads on this site?
Was it to do with making the site pay for itself?
WHO decided to display ads on this site?
Was this person a NEW admin or partner?

Personally, I believe that someone is out to destroy this site under the guise of trying to help it.

I would much rather pay $10 a year for an ad free forum than the garbage that this site has now become, or go over to deathshadow's forum on cutcodedown.com (by the way deathshadow , you might want to think about changing that site name to cutdowncode.com - its easier to remember and rolls off the tongue more easily).

Google ads are the worst ads anyone can put anywhere as they slow down page loads, prevent pages from quickly loading on older devices (XP and 32bit Win7 - but mostly on 32bit machines), etc.

Having these awful ads makes for a site which is no longer as useful as it once was and I totally agree with deathshadow on why this site is no longer frequented by people as much as it used to be.

For me, huge ads in the header area and another one at the foot of the page are a huge turn off.

You ask for feedback and yet do nothing when one of the best coders the forum has ever had makes many valid points and the site still looks and runs like crap.

If the real reason for the ads is to make money to cover site expenses why not ask for donations instead and/or make it a subscription based site? Otherwise just let the site close down since it is not visited very much by anyone nowadays.

If you really care about this site, do an analysis of the stats and find out why they started declining. When the site was busy find out what made it busy and go back to that way of doing things. I have no doubt that you will find that user access has declined since ads started being posted here.

[chump2877]

Thank you for your feedback.

WHY did someone decide to put ads on this site?
Was it to do with making the site pay for itself?
WHO decided to display ads on this site?
Was this person a NEW admin or partner?

Yes, the ads are here in an effort to have the site pay for itself. As the current owner, it was my decision.

The previous owners also displayed ads. Then, when ownership transferred to me (and VIPStephan , at the time), there was a 2-year period when the site had no ads. Now, we've resorted to displaying ads again for the above-stated purpose.

A few months ago, we were fortunate enough to raise enough money via member contributions to pay for another year of website hosting and maintenance. Some time shortly after that, we enabled ads again so that, in the future, we could hopefully generate the needed revenue to keep the site online via advertising rather than asking members for money every year.

I would much rather pay $10 a year for an ad free forum than the garbage that this site has now become

I appreciate the sentiment (and I wished more people shared it), but I don't know that relying on member contributions in the future is the most reliable source of revenue. I don't remember the exact number offhand, but a relatively small number of members were actually willing to contribute their hard-earned money. So, if I were to enforce a $10/yr subscription for all members and remove all ads, then that would likely eliminate the majority of the members registered on this site (who would simply opt to find another free site in lieu of paying an annual fee.).

Google ads are the worst ads anyone can put anywhere as they slow down page loads, prevent pages from quickly loading on older devices (XP and 32bit Win7 - but mostly on 32bit machines), etc.

Can you please suggest an alternative ad network, with comparable earning potential? I am open to your ideas.

Having these awful ads makes for a site which is no longer as useful as it once was and I totally agree with deathshadow on why this site is no longer frequented by people as much as it used to be.

Again, there was a 2-year period when this site had no ads. During that period, I paid for the majority of expenses to keep the site online (earning no revenue in the process), and we did not experience a substantial increase or decrease in member activity. In general, website traffic has been consistently low for the past few years, with or without ads on the site.

For me, huge ads in the header area and another one at the foot of the page are a huge turn off.

OK, so exactly where could we place ads on the site, to avoid this issue? (The header ads do generate the most ad revenue.) Again, I am open to your ideas.

If you really care about this site, do an analysis of the stats and find out why they started declining. When the site was busy find out what made it busy and go back to that way of doing things. I have no doubt that you will find that user access has declined since ads started being posted here.

I do care about this site. Site traffic was already low when Stephan and I took over website operations and expenses. Unfortunately, I do no have access to stats and site metrics during the previous owner's tenure. If I did, I could do as you say.

In short: I understand your frustration, so if we can find a middle ground that will enable us to channel your constructive criticism in a positive, practical, and productive way (that is beneficial for everyone in the community, members and owner/admins alike) then I'm all for making some changes here. And it bears repeating: I make no profit from this site, and any money that I do get in the form of contributions and ad revenue is only reserved for and used to pay for website operations and expenses.

Thanks again!

[chump2877]

FYI - I've just now updated this setting: https://support.google.com/adsense/a...61806?hl=en-GB

It was set to exactly in the middle (between Min and Max). Now it's set closer to Min.

According to Adsense, this appears to be the difference between 3-4 in-page ads vs. 6-7 in-page ads.

Let me know if it helps!

[chump2877]

In the interest of full transparency, this is how much money I've earned with AdSense ads since enabling them again in mid-October 2022:

image.pngI've earned $2.62 since mid-October. (Again: In the 2 years prior to that, when there were no ads, I earned nothing.)

So, so far, ad revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to our website expenses. Thus, we could reasonably decrease the number and frequency of ads for now. Let me know if you'd like to see even fewer ads since I recently tweaked Adsense settings a few minutes ago, and I'll see what I can do.

Thank you.

[deathshadow]

First up I did find the "ad-block" warning showing up even with adblock disabled WAS my ISP's DNS blocking certain things as untrustworthy. Turns out it was also responsible for 250ms+ of "blocking time" on cache empty first-loads in both Vivaldi and Firefox ... I just recently upgraded to gigabit symmetric fiber, and in the process I set DNS to 1.1.1.1 which cleared up a LOT of problems for accessing various poorly written bloated sites. (No offense, I know most of the blame lies on vBull's doorstep)

Which let me turn ad blocking back on, and then kill the anti-ad block using Stylus and a bit of !important magic.

FYI - I've just now updated this setting: According to Adsense, this appears to be the difference between 3-4 in-page ads vs. 6-7 in-page ads.

Dan Schulz (RIP my friend) used to say that "If people don't click on one ad, they're not going to click on twenty of them."... and there's a reason CNET's "download.com" is untrustworthy and nobody uses it by choice anymore.

Excessive numbers of ads looks desperate, and illegitimate. Viewing the site in its current state advertising enabled, it's often hard to find the content for all the marketing scam BS. I guarantee you that's costing you users, particularly since that much overhead is pushing load times up into the ten-second plus mark on fiber. I don't even want to think what "po folk" 'muricans where 3mbps is a luxury and 500ms ping times are the norm are facing here.

You mentioned lighthouse. Something to beware of is that the speed of your connection and distance from server effects its results. It's not a 100% reflection of 'just the server and code".

So first lemme pull up what my alleged "gigabit" can "really" do.

image.png
Not bad considering I ran that with Disney+ playing "Andor" in the background. Taking into consideration the ping times, we can now do a proper lighthouse evaluation.

image.png

That is NOT good. And a lot of that can be blamed on the advertisements, more of it though can be blamed on the forum software itself and quite possibly the hosting. That blocking time isn't good given that's no longer on my end -- though with the crappy DNS of my ISP you'd add 250-300ms to that, resulting in a 20-30 second page load.

That 13 seconds of "time to live?" ... that has to be causing a lot of bounce. People just giving up on even using this site before it even finishes loading! In fact that's why I've been less active until I got adblock working and was able to block the stupid warning of same. Because for me, as a user, all those ads add to an already slow and hard to put up with page.

Ideally what you should have for something as simple as a forums should look something like this...

image.png
Though if I'd get off my *** and write the custom template for it I keep meaning to, I could probably get all four metrics up above 95%.

I mean after all, I've got a scripting only crapplet I've been writing about on medium that pulls a miracle out of its backside.

image.png
On the same hosting my forums are on.

If we look at the waterfall for here though, there's a lot of things that could help greatly.

Reducing to one or two ads and that's it is a good start. More than that just pisses off users into leaving or going through the hoops of using an adblock and telling the anti-adblock to suck an egg.

Implementing HTTP2 on the hosting and maybe adding prefetch -- though prefetch can be more placebo than fact depending on how you use it. It's one of the first things lighthouse warns you about.

The manner by which you've got those ads implemented is also headache inducing. I'm not sure who told you that's how adsense works, but it's not good given the script before the ads, and then again at the bottom. Pick one or the other, not both! Two <ins> tags and a script at the bottom. Anything more complex is BS! I'm running ONE advert on my forums/site per page and the revenue is roughly equal to yours! When honestly you should be seeing higher revenue given how this site is established with a backlog of valuable content. That has to make you ask "what's creating bounce and/or a lack of traffic?" Though I'm sure the change to .net didn't help.

Silly question, are you using some rubbish plugin to try and automagically add the ads? If so "well there's your problem".

Finding or rewriting the template -- and this is a bit of a people in glass houses moment for me -- should also be a priority. When a page with 4k of plaintext and zero content media is blowing 144k of markup on delivering it? Well, that's a monument to those pesky 3i of web development: Ignorance, incompetence, and ineptitude.

But that's an off the shelf vBull template for you. See such garbage as:

        <div class="js-post__content-wrapper l-col__flex-3 l-col--post__body l-col__small--full h-restore--on-preview">
            <div class="b-post__body h-restore--on-preview h-padding-horiz-xxl h-padding-top-xl h-padding-bottom-m h-clearfix">
                <div class="b-post__arrow b-post__hide-when-deleted"></div>

                

                <div class="b-post__content js-post__content">
                    <hr class="b-divider--section" />

                    <div class="b-media h-hide--on-preview">
                        <div class="b-media__img--rev">​

doing the job of:

<section class="post">
  <header>

Again though that's not you, that's the incompetence of vBull and those who make templates for it. There's a reason a lot of websites abandoned using it well over a decade ago, and it's pure comedy -- and scam artistry -- at this point they have the cojones to charge money for it.

[deathshadow]

Oh and could you do something about the illegible split pea soup green? I mean I can (and am) overriding it with stylus, but most users don't know enough CSS to do that on their own. Don't tell large swaths of users to go **** themselves over something as simple as bad colour contrasts.

There are much better things to tell users to go plow themselves over, like decade out of date browser support. That was s joke.

[judgedredd]

chump2877, you have added adsense that makes this site horrible for $2.62 in total revenue from October 2022????!!!!!!!!!!!! What craziness is that????? Heavens above I would be willing to donate to this site $2 a MONTH on an automatic payment through paypal or some other process (as paypal charge you, the recipient, 28% of anything you get via a monthly automatic direct debit) for you to turn off adsense altogether (which I would stop if any ads appeared anywhere on the site)!

Try what deathshadow suggested and put up only 1 ad per entire page if you don't want to get rid of adsense (and get rid of the one in the header/top of the page) and see if your revenue goes up/down. Because one thing that everyone has failed to mention is that the same ad (or the same company with 2-3 different ads) is sprinkled throughout the page (appearing inbetween posts) and one massive ad, from a different company, at the top of the page - which takes up more than half the height on a 1280 x 760 display. I hate to think how this site looks on mobile devices. Oy vey!!!!

[chump2877]

Addressing your recent responses:

First up I did find the "ad-block" warning showing up even with adblock disabled

I was not able to reproduce this issue. My opinion is: If I don't try to force ads, then there's no point in placing ads to begin with. Otherwise, I assume everyone (minus a few charitable individuals) is using some form of AdBlock.

Excessive numbers of ads looks desperate, and illegitimate. Viewing the site in its current state advertising enabled, it's often hard to find the content for all the marketing scam BS.

Silly question, are you using some rubbish plugin to try and automagically add the ads? If so "well there's your problem".

AdSense is currently, automatically placing my ads in so-called "optimal" locations. I do have some degree of control over what kinds of ads are placed. I was able to eliminate the big footer ad, but the method for killing the big header ad still eludes me. Maybe, when I have a bit of time, I should try creating ad zones/units in AdSense and placing ads "manually" (generally, within the scope of AdSense only -- because vBulletin Cloud does not give me direct access to most of the forum's source code) instead of relying on Google to place them automatically. The latter option is certainly easier for me.

In general, I don't have much experience in monetizing websites. My business requires to me to develop/sell web software and facilitate its monetization, but it has not given me profound insight into actually implementing and maintaining a long-term monetization strategy for any given web property. In this regard, most of what I do know is due to customer interaction and very limited personal experience.

That 13 seconds of "time to live?" ... that has to be causing a lot of bounce. People just giving up on even using this site before it even finishes loading!

In Lighthouse, in Chrome's "Incognito mode" (i.e., with browser extensions disabled because they add load time), I currently see the following for Desktop:

image.pngFor Mobile, I see:

image.pngCertainly, improvements could be made to the Mobile experience. That said, the site on my Android phone looks fine and seems fast enough. Desktop is OK. In general, it seems that the AdSense ads are the primary culprit for blocking page load, and this is most evident on mobile devices.

The manner by which you've got those ads implemented is also headache inducing. I'm not sure who told you that's how adsense works, but it's not good given the script before the ads, and then again at the bottom. Pick one or the other, not both! Two <ins> tags and a script at the bottom. Anything more complex is BS!

vBulletin Cloud's admin section limits any flexibility one would otherwise have when placing ad code. Some screenshots:

image.png
image.png
I entered the ad code in a counter-intuitive way because of the vBulletin interface. If there's a better way, please do let me know.

Again though that's not you, that's the incompetence of vBull and those who make templates for it. There's a reason a lot of websites abandoned using it well over a decade ago, and it's pure comedy -- and scam artistry -- at this point they have the cojones to charge money for it.

We're using vBulletin Cloud because the site was already using vBulletin when I took over. Simply put: It was the only sane way to host a vBulletin site without spending time that I don't have to maintain a local installation and server. (I'm already doing plenty of that for my day job.) And, converting vBulletin data to another forum software was entirely too convoluted and time-consuming to ever seriously consider.

Oh and could you do something about the illegible split pea soup green? I mean I can (and am) overriding it with stylus, but most users don't know enough CSS to do that on their own. Don't tell large swaths of users to go **** themselves over something as simple as bad colour contrasts.

Are we talking about "all" page elements that have this color? In any case, I'll see what I could do. Do you have a color preference, other than "more contrast"?

chump2877, you have added adsense that makes this site horrible for $2.62 in total revenue from October 2022????!!!!!!!!!!!! What craziness is that?????

Other than deathshadow, you are the only other person to complain about the ads. In my opinion: One person is an anomaly, 2 is a coincidence, and 3 is a pattern. So, when I sense the makings of a pattern in community feedback, then I'm more inclined to make changes. Which is why we're discussing this now.

Heavens above I would be willing to donate to this site $2 a MONTH on an automatic payment through paypal or some other process (as paypal charge you, the recipient, 28% of anything you get via a monthly automatic direct debit) for you to turn off adsense altogether (which I would stop if any ads appeared anywhere on the site)!

Again, I appreciate the sentiment. Perhaps, eventually, if advertising revenue continues on its current trajectory, then I will resort to asking for donations once a year instead to keep the site online. I've honestly only checked my AdSense a ccount a couple of times since early November.

I hate to think how this site looks on mobile devices.

The current ads adhere to the principles of responsive web design.

Thank you for your valuable feedback!

[VIPStephan]

Oh and could you do something about the illegible split pea soup green? I mean I can (and am) overriding it with stylus, but most users don't know enough CSS to do that on their own. Don't tell large swaths of users to go **** themselves over something as simple as bad colour contrasts.

Regarding the color scheme, there are three themes to choose from, CF Light, CF Green and CF Dark. The light theme is a reminiscence of the original style back in the old days. The “green” theme seeks to be a middle ground between light and dark and reflect the style of the late predecessor and the dark theme is trying to keep the signature green on a dark background as good as possible.

I’m responsible for the look of the site and let me tell you, it’s a pain in the *** to style vBulletin themes, so it’s unlikely that there will be any major changes in that regard anytime soon, especially since you can’t serve everyone anyway and there is probably always going to be complaints.