I browse GRM on my phone 99.5% of the time. I honestly barely noticed the ads.
I browse GRM on my phone 99.5% of the time. I honestly barely noticed the ads.
Steve_Jones said:April 1 2020 GRM Asks for donations "to keep the lights on"
June 1 2020 GRM makes a political donation
Dec 1 2020 they start running obtrusive ads "to keep the lights on"
Dec 15 2020 people complain about the ads because they're donating to keep the place going and are told tough luck
Most here are ok with that and those that have an issue are shouted down. Like someone posted here before
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them"
That's a Maya Angelou quote.
Anyway, what a great forum we have if this is the biggest complaint.
Hey a note comment to that, the ads are way better on my phone than they are on my big screen. On the computer monitor they look out of place and wrongly sized. On the phone they fit nicely in and they look right.
These particular ads don't bother me. Easy to scroll by, hard to accidentally click.
I also much prefer this forum format over vBulletin or any of the other common ones.
noddaz said:Not having the forum would be more than annoying.
When earlier in the year GRM asked for us to support the forum financially, I did so and have continued to do so monthly. Yeah, i'm not going to go broke over it, but i feel like between that and having a paid subscription to the magazine (and buying stuff from the GRM store), I'm doing my part to help the forum survive. I guess my view is that I'm putting my money where my mouth is, so I (and others who donate cash to the forum) may have more of a case when it comes to the ads.
That said, Tom said they're working on it, so I'll leave it at that and see how it pans out.
And for the record, I actually like the forum "as is" just fine (aside from the new ad location lol)
Marjorie Suddard said:Yeah, remember that time we paid for months of our staffers' time and travel to finish a recently deceased forum member's project car so we could auction it off and give the money to his daughter for school? We didn't have buckets of money--or time--to throw around then, either, but felt it was the right thing to do.
Speaking of not having buckets of money, not that we have to disclose this, but we wrote a $20K check to the web developers this week because the software is so outdated, it will cost that much just to bring it into a supported version. These ads will not come close to paying for that in the course of an entire year. But we thought to do more would be too disruptive for our forum people, so we have settled on this compromise.
Margie
Just to be clear, I love you guys, I love this place, I have GRM stickers plastered on racecars and tow rigs and whatnot, I've talked dozens of people into subscribing to the mag and doing GRM events, and I understand things take money to run - including BOTH ads and the cash I and others donate. The only thing I was referring to in this thread was the specific placement of the new ads, not the existence of ads here in general (which I have never adblocked, for what it's worth).
Hell, I work for a large federal government agency and we dump more money in a day into some of our "collaboration solutions" than GRM probably does in a decade. And the GRM forum is still more functional than the garbage most of these IT defense contractors shovel at us. So there's something to say for that ;)
Definitely prefer the GRM forum solution to canned vbulletin crap. It's laid out more nicely, and I also assume that via security-through-obscurity it is less susceptible to hacks.
I wish in this sucky year this was the worst thing I had to complain about. I had to go to my laptop to see what everybody was bitching about. Methinks thou doth protest too much.
spitfirebill said:Methinks thou doth protest too much.
Isn't that an ironic phrase that would actually indicate that I secretly LIKE the ads? :D
Thanks for the support, everybody. It means more than you'd think to end the day with some positivity. Thank you.
The ads don't annoy me but the site has been running a bit jerky since they appeared for me.
My phone is terribly old though too
It's annoying, but I don't want to lose this place either.
irish44j (Forum Supporter) said:spitfirebill said:Methinks thou doth protest too much.
Isn't that an ironic phrase that would actually indicate that I secretly LIKE the ads? :D
If they keep the forum here, I do love them. Now You Tube is a totally different animal and I'm about to bail out there.
Antihero (Forum Supporter) said:The ads don't annoy me but the site has been running a bit jerky since they appeared for me.
My phone is terribly old though too
This issue is now fixed (we moved to a faster server).
Tom - If I buy from an advertiser and get to their site by clicking on a link here, do you guys see any affiliate fees? If not, is that something you could institute? As others mentioned, I'd happily start my parts purchasing process here each time if it meant a few $$$ going your way.
In reply to dyintorace (Forum Supporter) :
Affiliate fees aren't really a thing for most of our advertisers, but they do see that revenue directly attributed to our website and it helps immensely. That would be great!
RevRico said:In reply to mr2s2000elise :
Adguard for android, adblockplus for desktop.
No ads anywhere.
Thank you. I will see if I can find your recommendations for Apple device
appreciate it
My only small issue with the ads is their, I guess the frequency of the individual companies? If that makes sense?
I was scrolling and checking out posts and clicked on something to check out a post and an ad caught my eye, something about race louvers. So let the page load, different ad, no problem I'll go back, but it was a different ad again. I think I went back and forth a bunch of times and checked different posts in hopes the ad would pop up again and I didn't see it for quite some time. Eventually it did pop up again so I could click the link to check them out.
I just thought it was weird that I saw Holley's ad and Titan XL ( I think that's the name ) a few times while trying to find Race Louvre's because I wanted to click the link through the forum vs just googling them. I don't know if the ads we see are based on our own IP address (I have spent a lot of time on Holley's website at work for work) or if it's a different algorithm based on something else.
Other than that I barely notice the ads, they are a lot less intrusive than some of the ones I see on other forums, and A LOT more likely for me to click on since most ads I see on other car forums are to news articles about what some guy in europe got away with by using one simple trick.
Woody (Forum Supportum) said:It's annoying, but I don't want to lose this place either.
Agreed!
I was talking on the phone with another GRM'er last night and the realization was made that there is no viable alternative to the GRM forum...the second best community on the internet is about 0.0001% as good.
Plan "B" is like "we've got trolling, trolling, trolling, trolling, useful discourse, trolling, & trolling, that's not too much trolling"
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