I noticed for the first time tonight, ad's included in our individual postings. Is it supposed to be like that? It looks as if individual members are now endorsing something...and I'm just worried that I might get the Viagra or How I Cured My Reflux ones.... ???

.

This sucks!

I'm here to chat about guitars, amps and just meet new guitar lovers.
Now I get bombarded by ads about life insurance!

Norio, can we not remove these? Maybe place this on the clasified stuff.

Firefox + Adblock Plus = no problems ... ?

We get bombarded by Ads all day. Why here as well....??? >

It's like have a good private conversation with friends in your home and then the door to door salesman knocks on your front door trying to sell you brushes...!!!! ???

It's an Ad invasion

Heino, seems like you are selling insurance ?

Looks like keywords in our posts are triggering the ads. Just looked at an Epiphone Classified from Stellenbosch and there were ads attached for Epiphone and Stellenbosch.

(Probably will also get attached to my post....)

They seem to dynamically attach to the most recent post.

hrm Ive obviously blocked the source before as Im not seeing any ads? 8)

Manfred Klose wrote: Heino, seems like you are selling insurance ?

Yeah buddy, I've got you covered ?
That's what she said? Sorry, it was a long day

Mhm... on second thought... I guess these ads are kinda entertaining...

The ads might be annoying but we need to find *some* way to pay for this site. Many man hours go into running this and I hope to do much greater things for the community in the future but all that costs $$$.

Tacky or not, ads are a necessary evil of the interwebs. And the closer they are to the content, the more targeted they are and the more likely they'll actually make money. Them be the facts! I don't write the rules, I just play by them.

The ads show on the 1st post and last post of every thread. I'm testing this out for 1-2 weeks. If it works, they'll be staying but I may move them a bit away from the content of each post and will likely make it a bit more obvious that they're ads, and not endorsements.

Please bear with me. Short of charging membership fees, I know no other way to keep this thing going strong. This is unavoidable gents. This forum must make money to carry on.

OK. Makes sense. I'm Behind you.

Like anything new,one gets used to it after a while. ?

@TomCat: Thanks ? Good to have some support!

The ads show on the 1st post and last post of every thread

Ok, I can live with that Norio.

I do understand that the forum needs money to continue. Hosting is expensive.
What most people don't understand is that when the forum grow the hardware and traffic cost increase.
I was under the impresion that this forum was hosted on someones private server.

Norio, if these ads pay for the site, then I'm with you.

Guys some intresting facts:

This is the delay from the IS backbone to GFSA for the past 24 hours:

Hope to supply you with much more intresting facts soon on multiple South African backbones.

inflames wrote: What most people don't understand is that when the forum grow the hardware and traffic cost increase.

Spot on!

inflames wrote: I was under the impresion that this forum was hosted on someones private server.

It's hosted on my business server and will eventually need its own server. That's around R1k a month right there.

But wait, there's more!

Alan and I are passionate about GFSA and we want it to be our "job" so, for us to spend a lot of time working on it to make it better, we need some sort of income.

I'm also looking at paying moderators some sort of income for all their hard work. After all, we'd be completely challengeless if it wasn't for Rene and all his effort!

And lastly, I want to offer serious competition prizes each month. R1,000 vouchers and so on. Sure we can (and will) get sponsored prizes from music stores but we're still a bit small to get the sort of sponsorship I want so we've got to fill in those gaps ourselves.

Then there's the costs of design, advertising, etc. (I'm sure there'll be more to come in the future that I haven't even considered yet). So ja, it's definitely not just the hosting but even that isn't covered yet.

inflames wrote: Norio, if these ads pay for the site, then I'm with you.

Thanks! ?

PS: Looking forward to the stats. Is sub-14ms delays good?

No worries Norio, if it pays for the site then I'm OK with it, Viagra or not! ?

No sweat with the ads, especially after reading Norio's reasonings. Advertizing pays for everything; radio, tv, ... I just thought that my browzer was going gezoonk when I first saw them. I'm just a little disappointed that the bikini girls for my celphone ad at the top disappeared so quick.

The adds don't bother me that much. To be honest, I did not even see the post adds until they were mentioned in this thread. I'm so used to them from other forums! ? O, and I completely understand the need and reasoning for them as well.

Go ahead Norio. If its whats needed to keep this site going, Im sure all of us wouldnt mind.

Afterall, my day wouldnt be the same without GFSA :'(