pop-ups and pop-unders

I find the popups fairly unobtrusive and don't affect the page loading times at all, they're easy enough to close down afterall and if it means the excellent quality of this site is maintained I'm sure we can all put up with them.

I loathe pop ups and pop unders. Unfortunately, the maintenance cost for this web site is pretty high. In the beginning we could manage to pay most of our bills with banners only, but the ad market is still going down - everytime I think things will get a bit better, they don't, so I'm not sure where this is all going to end. June was the worst month ever when we talk about revenue from ads. Actually, in both May and June I had to put money on the site, because the revenue from ads didn't cover all the costs.

What is pretty funny is that just today I managed to find a way to only show pop unders once every 12 hours for our users. Before that, you could get pop unders/ups several times while surfing the website. So I find this kinda odd, because I figured users would enjoy this change, not dislike it.

Anyway, we're thinking about implementing a subscription/donation-based system, where users who contribute to the website won't see any ads at all. No pop ups/unders, no banners, nothing. This may take a while to happen, as I've been pretty busy lately, but that might be an option for you.

As you said, the money has to come from somewhere... Unfortunately, I'm not rich enough to keep up with all those costs by myself. Maybe someday I'll be able to do so and even hire a couple of people to do all the work I now do, out of passion and love, so I can fully concentrate on participating on the forums and enjoying the website myself, which is something I have not been able to do for many years now. But until that day, unfortunately, we'll have to live with the ads.

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Shine on,
Paulo

"What is more important: Satisfying one thousand desires or conquering just one?" - Samsara

I think the amount of pop-ups is quite accettable and they don't affect the navigation through the website. I agree with Dr Cheese, keep up the good work, Paulo.

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"Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk." Tom Waits

I didnt wanna sound ungrateful, because I understand why you're doing it. The donation/subscription thing sounds great. We're considering it too, over where I admin.

Besides ads, you could also give other benefits to paying members, like attach feature, a custom title etc.

I hate to whine, but today a pop-up has appeared that is causing problems with my computer. What's more, it appears every time I do anything at all on this site.

The ad is for "Britney Spears Image Gallery". Each time it appears (which is EVERY time), it causes two Javascript errors on the AOL browser. As I would guess a large percentage of your users have AOL, I think this may turn into a genuine inconvenience. Sorry to whine. When ads don't cause errors and appear EVERY time like this, I don't mind. But this particular one is a royal pain.

__________________
"And with these words I can see
Clear through the clouds that covered me
Just give it time then speak my name
Now we can hear ourselves again..."

WrightSatellite #1

Odd. It's gone now.

I logged off of my Internet connection earlier, and now that I've come back on, the ad has stopped appearing--in fact, I'm not getting a single popup now.

Sorry for being a pain earlier...

__________________
"And with these words I can see
Clear through the clouds that covered me
Just give it time then speak my name
Now we can hear ourselves again..."

WrightSatellite #1

Just now, when I was surfing the web site, I got one pop under every time I opened up another page (and I open a lot of new windows). I'm already looking at what is wrong, but in the meantime I've deactivated the new pop under system, while we go back to the old one. Sorry for the trouble!

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Shine on,
Paulo

"What is more important: Satisfying one thousand desires or conquering just one?" - Samsara

That's OK.

I have a GUESS as to what the glitch might be. This is intuition only--I am not a programmer. The way you've got it set is to show a popup once every twelve hours--but the result is it's showing one popup for the entire duration of that login. To make it stop, I had to let it go fifteen minutes so I was no longer on the "active users" list. When I came back after that time, it reset it to count another twelve hours. Could this be what's going on?

Obviously I can't help you in the debugging of your code, but I'm going to guess that's what your error is. I hope this helps a little.

__________________
"And with these words I can see
Clear through the clouds that covered me
Just give it time then speak my name
Now we can hear ourselves again..."

WrightSatellite #1

Personally, I don't mind the pop-ups/unders. I've been to sites a lot worse.

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stchrissie is not me.

I've been on this site for a combined 3 hours, and the only pop-up I got was when I first came here.

Hmmm...that's queer. I have NEVER seen a pop-up on this site.

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Count me in on the journey, don't expect me to stay.

Ok, I implemented that code once more. I'd really appreciate if you could please let me know if you ever get more than one popunder per session, so I can get this straight. Thanks a lot!

Byron, you should have gotten fewer pop unders than those users from the US, but definately not none! Consider yourself lucky!

__________________
Shine on,
Paulo

"What is more important: Satisfying one thousand desires or conquering just one?" - Samsara

I do so, indeed. Very lucky!

Ahh, the good ol' U.S. of A.: advertisers Heav...ehm...Paradise, and the consumer's Hel...um...Inferno.

But honestly, I have NEVER seen a pop-up or pop-under (<SHUDDER> to think whatever those are) perhaps because anytime one is about to appear, my XP OS machine warns and asks if I want to allow or block a cookie or advert (pop-up thingy, I guess) this time or forever, and unless it's something I want - such as Mad Magazine - it gets blocked forever.

At least that's how I understand it to work on MY machine.

Just thought you'd...yadda, yadda, yadda.

Piper, I am receiving a popup (the same one) every time I make a move on the site at this time...as I said before, I think your code is set to do this for the duration of this login, and I'll have to go inactive for fifteen minutes to clear it. I will let you know if that indeed resets it.

__________________
"And with these words I can see
Clear through the clouds that covered me
Just give it time then speak my name
Now we can hear ourselves again..."

WrightSatellite #1