Noticing A Problem With Ad Loading?

[Michael]

The ad tag is changed back to its original state now. To anyone that encountered the problem, could you please test to see if you still get the wide leaderboard in the skyscraper spot?

[MaxToTheMax]

Well for what it's worth I still think that's a bug, even if intentional.

[Vash63]

That's not the ad being discussed. That will show for you once a day.

No? This ad is, however, the reason phoronix will never leave my adblock list. Ads that cover text is my #1 pet peeve online. As soon as Fennec is a little more stable on my Nexus One I'll make sure to adblock it there too.

[Michael]

See screenshot for actual date:

This is in the greater San Francisco Bay area.

That's not the ad being discussed. That will show for you once a day.

[MaxToTheMax]

See screenshot for actual date:

This is in the greater San Francisco Bay area.

[Michael]

Where can this special RSS feed be found? And will there be a proper solution in place?

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=41

A better solution will be in place once one is found. I've been working on writing my own vBulletin-compliant initializer for PHXCMS, but so far it's not working 100% correctly. The problem with including some vBulletin PHP files in the main site is that I am not sure it's allowed per the vBulletin license and it would also add bloat to PHXCMS that would increase server load and page load times.

[Vegar]

The current way to bypass this is to use the Phoronix Forums New Articles' RSS Feed, which will take you through the forum link to get to the article while initializing your forum account in the process.

Where can this special RSS feed be found? And will there be a proper solution in place?

[Michael]

Why don't you just put up a donate-button in the right-top and remove all the advertisements? Try it for a month or so; if it doesn't work out, put the ads back on.

That's really not viable especially in the long-term -- relying on donations would bring in less revenue than ads. About the only alternative to using ads + subscription service at Phoronix would be having the commercial subsidiary of the Phoronix Test Suite financing the Phoronix Media web presence upstream, but that probably wouldn't pan out well for some time and then there would be the complaints of users that the Phoronix.com sole source of revenue is being derived from many of the companies that we cover on the site.

[Michael]

I realise some of these pay revenue on a per click basis and you likely require ads on a per-view basis, but would it not be possible to have more relevant adverts? Technology, games, whatever. This would at least eliminate a large number of adverts people seem to really dislike.

The problem is there isn't enough targeted Linux ads to serve up for the page views that we do... In just a few days of the month we usually exhaust the ad budgets / impression orders of the relevant advertisers (RH, Novell, IBM, etc) so then the ad providers go on to try to serve other technology and other high-paying ads.

[Michael]

I used to be a premium member, simply because I wanted to support this great site and read multi-page articles in one page, and the membership had the benefit of hiding the ads.

However, I use an RSS reader to get all the news and I usually load three or four phoronix articles in my browser before reading them. This caused my browser to load the standard ad-blown, 90-pages-per-article phoronix because I wasn't logged in to the forums. So to get rid of the ads, I had to click the forums link, then go back and reload all the articles. Quite a hassle, I might as well just ditch the RSS reader.

I posted about it in the premium-only forum, and someone (Mikael, IIRC) said he was going to look into it. It still hasn't happened, and I won't consider renewing my subscription until it does.

I am sure it is just a matter of including the right php file from the forums in scan.php or whatever file is used to present the articles.

Lately, the ads have become so annoying that I had to install adblock for the sole purpose of blocking ads from phoronix. You are driving your readers away with the kontera/intelliTXT ads. I usually stay clear off most websites that have annoying hover-on-text popups, and I am sure I'm not the only one.

The premium-only forum thread in question can be found here:

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12538

Can any of the premium members confirm that this is still an issue?

The current way to bypass this is to use the Phoronix Forums New Articles' RSS Feed, which will take you through the forum link to get to the article while initializing your forum account in the process.