Your site sucks

Question

Your placement of ads is so annoying that I will not visit again. Good-bye.

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

Thank you for your feedback.

If it's any consolation to you, you are probably not the only one with these feelings.

CJ

Blue Jay · Answer

anonymous
Your placement of ads is so annoying that I will not visit again. Good-bye.

Thank you for your feedback. Let me first of all offer a defence of ads. All the people who post replies on this site are unpaid volunteers. All the moderators and forum admins who work behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly are unpaid volunteers. We strive to deliver as much as possible as cheaply as possible, but running the most-visited English learning help forum on the internet isn't free. The servers that host the website aren't free. Ancillary services we use to help us deliver content reliably, such as Cloudflare, cost money. We have a couple of paid professionals on staff to polish the pistons and grease the sprockets of the website so it continues to work reliably, and they like to get paid for their work. We have to update our code from time to time to stay current with evolving internet standards, and we'd like to introduce new features so we can offer more help to more people. These things don't just happen. The way we raise money to pay for all this is by showing ads on the site, but making this whole setup work is getting progressively harder. Until very recently we only showed ads to anonymous visitors, and not to logged-in members. We have now—reluctantly—changed this to where we now show more ads to anonymous visitors than we used to, and we've started showing a limited number of ads to some logged-in members. We are still working on trying to find the sweet spot where we have the revenue we need to keep the site running, and fund some improvements, while bothering people with ads as little as possible.

The ads you see fund the site, but if you hate seeing ads there are things you can do:

Become a member. It's free, and you'll see fewer ads.
Try a different browser. Your results may vary, but I've found I generally see the most ads in Chrome and the least in Opera and Firefox.
The nuclear option: ad-blockers. Most major desktop browsers support extensions, and there are a number of free ad-blocker extensions available. The one I recommend is "uBlock Origin", by Raymond Hill, aka "Gorhill". Out of the box it does a great job of blocking ads, and if you dig into the settings you'll find even more things it can do to make your internet surfing faster, safer, and more enjoyable. If uBlock Origin were unavailable, "Ad-Block Plus" would probably be my second choice. Some desktop browsers have a built in ad-blocker that can be enabled (Opera, Brave, and Slimjet for example). Firefox's tracker-blocker seems to block some ads. Some mobile browsers have an ad-blocker available too (Opera, for instance). Using an ad-blocker will greatly improve your internet experience; just keep in mind it deprives the sites you enjoy of revenue.

Your site sucks

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