TexasCHLforum.com

WFAA's site here in DFW has become un-usable because of stuff like that. You will be reading and some HUGE add will take up the top 2/3 of the screen and you have so scroll down to keep reading.

You go to read a news story, and the video of that segment from the last newscast will autoplay... after a 15 second ad. They had inline ads on their app for about a week. I sent them a blistering email about that one.

Unfortunately, that is what they have to do to be profitable these days. How about showing the news and not putting a liberal slant on it, or being "content partners" with the liberal Fort Worth Startle Gram.

Adblock took care of the problem for me, but I need to try the Houston Chronicle website. They have garbage like AJSully421 describes.

Chas.

Ghostery. It's a plugin that I use with Chrome. I assume it's available for other browsers as well.
https://www.ghostery.com/

Not only blocks ads, but trackers as well. I just can't deal with all the ads and things without it.

Pop ups and pop unders are 1990s technology that should have gone away

while I understand the desire to not see ads
keep in mind the internet and the servers it runs on aint free and the ads you are blocking are paying so you can see the content you are consuming ..
Its a trade off

I run a couple enthusiast forums like this - mine are auto related
One has been declining in ad revenue for years -
If it declines much more Ill just close it - ad blockers are part of the reason

Just be mindful that running adblockers 100% of the time is contributing to the demise of content on the internet
This site runs no ads. It must be privately bankrolled. Not all sites can do that.
A low estimate of the cost to run a site like this is in the $500 to $700 a month range if its done efficiently. With no need for admin intervention or hardware upgrades you might get that down to $300 to $400... Maybe less if the database size and traffic is less than I figured.

Charles - consider running CSF firewall and blocking entire IP ranges by country. And set it to auto block IPs for 15 min after 5 malicious attempts. This is a domestically focused site. So blocking all the "stans" ( Pakistan, Kurdistan etc) and all the known hacker strong holds ( china, russia etc ) over seas will significantly reduce your exposure and server load, while having almost zero impact on Texas gun owners who view the site.

If it were just seeing the ads taking up some space on the page, I wouldn't mind them. What I do mind is the tracking, pop-up/under, and other underhanded trickery some of them do.

Ad blockers may be "contributing to the demise of content on the internet", but you can blame the proliferation of ad blockers on unscrupulous companies' ads.

I dont have a problem with ads, but have a major one with abusive pop up/under and will not tolerate the intrusion.

In addition to adblock plus I use No Script https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... /noscript/.

Allow active content to run only from sites you trust, and protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks

Versions for chrome and android are available.

Noscript will stop the auto start videos & most of the abusive ads. There is a learning curve that can be a bit frustrating, but once you learn to use it you will like it.

Russell wrote:

92f-fan wrote: A low estimate of the cost to run a site like this is in the $500 to $700 a month range if its done efficiently. With no need for admin intervention or hardware upgrades you might get that down to $300 to $400... Maybe less if the database size and traffic is less than I figured.

Sorry but what? I would love to see how you are coming up with these figures. I've run large forums of this size as well before, and of course run and bankroll texas3006.com and the cost isn't anywhere near that. Knock a 0 off and you get my cost per month. I'm handling about a million hits a month with that increasing as more folks pick up our mobile apps and begin using them. The VM's load is very low and ought to be able to handle 10X that before I have to consider upgrading...

I would expect this forum's traffic to be a lot higher than my site, but you can get some pretty beefy virtual machines and dedicated servers for a lot cheaper than your figure.

Hits mean nothing - if you had a static html page with a thousand graphic elements and it was seen 1,000 times thats a million hits. In that example you had 1000 page views, from some fraction of that many humans. If you had a PHP page like this one with 10 to 20 queries per page, the server load goes up in a non linear fashion. Busy sql likes fast drives, fast drives cost $.

I was quoting dedicated server pricing. A decent dedicated server that can run significant sql queries per hour costs a minimum of $200 a month and Charles has stated that he has help with some of the technical pieces, so I added $100 for that, and to properly manage a site like this you need some paid software along with the open source stuff so add in some license fees here and there.. Many Webhosts charge for backup space so if you offer daily or multiple t8imes per day backups that adds $$. you stated to drop off a zero from my estimate. This site has over a million posts, Id love to see a web account for under $80 that would support that kind of mysql load.

While your site may run happily on a VM or a slice of a server it likely doesn't see hundreds or thousands of updates an hour. A mid size forum often sees that kind of traffic.

My point was about more than just this site but most sites that exist on the internet cost some $$.
And most are run by people or businesses who expect to make $$ to pay for food and lodging. And maybe beer. That $$ often comes from Advertising and Ad blockers impact that. Without ads soon the only sites left will be behind paywalls or enthusiast sites like this one, some of mine and yours that are bankrolled at a loss...
And in my opinion that would be a shame.

Cudos on finding an inexpensive solution for hosting your site.
I see you are running cloudflare - is that the free version ?

There's always the wonderful click-bait sites, too. "74 Reasons Marco Rubio is A Bad Candidate". Have to click through to each new reason which generates a new site click and a bunch of new ad impressions. Scam.

Joes data center

Thats awesome

And the prices seem very competitive
My current server is fully managed which helps me keep my sanity ...

Just thought I would revisit this thread for others benefit. I downloaded adblock for chrome and the quality of my life has improved dramatically. Ok, without the hyperbole, the quality of my surfing experience has improved dramatically.

I have also noticed my download and upload speed has improved as well. I am not getting what my ISP advertises and what I have been paying. I highly recommend trying it if you are getting frustrated with pages loading slowly and all the junk that clutters your display.