I would have to agree with you, I think the ad's suck bigtime, while I understand the need to fund the site it would be nice if WE had a way to turn off the ad's.
(This post was edited by stratostar on Apr 27, 2008, 8:12 AM)
PhreeZone (D License)
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Apr 27, 2008, 7:29 AM
Post #3 of 35
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Re: [stratostar] Don't like the "stuff" on the left
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I'd like it if Premier members would be able to turn off at least the top Google ad. The My Stuff on the side is almost needsed or else the top bar with "My friends" and everything else would strech off the page if you tried to combine them.
My initial reaction is that dropzone.com's environment has changed from one of being a place for skydivers where there happens to be advertising; to an advertising forum where there happens to be skydivers. Having said that; the infrastructure costs increase proportionately as the membership and/or viewing increases. One suggestion I made some time ago was to allow a temporary free membership for thirty days, then a discounted membership scale based on subscription duration.
If one joins for 3 months - $30.00 (ten bucks a month), 6 month membership - $9.00 month, 12 month membership - $8.00 month Lifetime membership - X
If > than 30 day trial period... disable profile.
As it stands now - we no pay; we have no say. If we're not the paying customers; the advertising engines are, therefore they have the input on placement - not us.
Oh c'mon... $10.00 is about as much as a 12" Quizno's which lasts about ten minutes. $25.00 for a jump that lasts 70ish seconds How many hours a month do you have on here?
It is free on here. Hardly anyone would be on here if it cost. Who the hell would pay $120usd a year to be a member of any website? Skydiving is expensive enough.
I doubt the owner of this website would even consider charging people to use this website, donations maybe for premier but charging people would be the end of what this site is all about
... and who would vet which posts were a contribution to the knowledge base and which ones were not (i.e. who gets paid for their post and who gets charged to post)?
Maybe a good idea, but impossible to implement, IMO.
My point exactly. There is no purpose or reason to charge people to post on this website. It is not a porn site, it is a site where we all post answers to each others threads.
Why would anyone pay $10 a month to use this site? That would drastically reduce membership.
Hence....
Quote:
As it stands now - we no pay; we have no say. If we're not the paying customers; the advertising engines are, therefore they have the input on placement - not us.
This new layout stinks, and I'm not going to pay for membership to remove the adds. I wonder if enough people stop coming to the site, that it would go back to the old style?
At home I have a Mac cinema display and the new changes were not that bad....back at work today though on a normal 19" monitor and the "my stuff" on the left with ads does really make reading the forumns more difficult. I didn't know what everyone was complaining about...now I do. Horrible.
Much of the new Forums look and features are great, but I really do not like the stuff on the left (... My stuff... Ads by Google...).
It takes up too much room and scrunches the Forums menu & posts to the right. Don't like it.
I wish there was a way to hide that stuff on the left and let the Forums menu / posts take up the full frame / whole screen like they used to.
There are Ads on the forums? Who knew... (Firefox + Adblock Plus = most awesome web experience ever)
Anyways... uh, yeah the "My stuff" thing on the left really sucks. Wastes a TON of space on my screen for stuff that I won't click on hardly ever. There are now too many ways for me to get to my profile to edit it. It was easy before and its obnoxious now.
If you look at the way PHPBB/vBulletin manages profiles its a whole lot nicer.
I'm against it too. I hate having to scroll right on every single page I load in order to be able to read the messages. Having the content centered on your screen ought to be the default.
(This post was edited by JohnRich on Apr 28, 2008, 9:48 AM)
What size monitor are you using? On a 17 inch monitor I have 0 issues at a distance of up to about 5 feet reading the font at that resolution. If you are running on an LCD monitor if you are running at anything other then its native resolution you will have blurring anyways.
What size monitor are you using? On a 17 inch monitor I have 0 issues at a distance of up to about 5 feet reading the font at that resolution. If you are running on an LCD monitor if you are running at anything other then its native resolution you will have blurring anyways.
As a person who often gets stuck doing web design, it's bad practice to start questioning your users. If a lot of people are running that low of a resolution, then this was a bad design change. You can't say to someone, "Well, why can't you read it that small, I can" because that's just insulting.
I have an office users of which most of them can't read the screen if we run the flat panels at full resolution.
PhreeZone (D License)
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Apr 28, 2008, 1:44 PM
Post #23 of 35
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Re: [Fast] Don't like the "stuff" on the left
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At the same time if 95%+ of the users are running at a resolution of 1024*768 or larger it does not make sense to design an application at the lowest possible resolution just to account for the few users that are at a low resolution. http://www.w3schools.com/...browsers_display.asp These numbers are old and for a global snapshot but they show the downward trend in 800*600 or lower resolution. In 2002 it was at 50%, in early 2007 it was at 14% and falling fast. Here is a reference that shows it was down to 8% and falling sharply in mid 2007 - http://www.hypergurl.com/...ution-standards.html
Do I like all of the new design? Nope but I also can understand what it was designed for larger then 800*600 pages. The new ads on the left are either 120 pixels wide or 160 pixels plus the buffer between them and the content of the forums would take up 1/4 of the page on 800*600 where on a 1024*768 it only takes up less then 1/5 of the page.
Does it really matter the percentage of the screen that is used up? What blows is that it is being used up at all. Why can't the adds on the top be enough? If the traffic to dz.com doubles, so does the bandwidth, and so does the cost. But so does the exposure of the adds!!!!!! What has necessitated this change, I am very interested to know.
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