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Author Topic: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?  (Read 7526 times)

Farmerbob

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #60 on: August 08, 2011, 09:27:43 am »

Quote
With the recent limelight that DF has just received, there would be no better time than now for Toady to approach other indy gaming companies with the idea of self advertising within the genre on each others' web pages.

Sure that would make perfect sense.

If he was selling Dwarf Fortress

Err, he is selling Dwarf Fortress.  He might not be selling it for a firm up-front cost of X, but there is most certainly a creator / consumer relationship here.  That's where Toady's money comes from, whether you call it donations or voluntary payment for a cool game.
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Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #61 on: August 08, 2011, 10:54:35 am »

Anyone who cares about ads is running ad blocker software anyway. The DF wiki runs ads and anyone who plays DF is reading that, so ads can't be chasing people away, or they'd already be chased away by the ads on the wiki site.
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Buttery_Mess

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #62 on: August 08, 2011, 12:05:15 pm »

Quote
With the recent limelight that DF has just received, there would be no better time than now for Toady to approach other indy gaming companies with the idea of self advertising within the genre on each others' web pages.

Sure that would make perfect sense.

If he was selling Dwarf Fortress

Err, he is selling Dwarf Fortress.  He might not be selling it for a firm up-front cost of X, but there is most certainly a creator / consumer relationship here.  That's where Toady's money comes from, whether you call it donations or voluntary payment for a cool game.

Yeah, just like how charities sell helping the needy, and you pay for Xbox games at GAME with an honesty box.
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But .... It's so small!
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Farmerbob

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #63 on: August 08, 2011, 09:15:51 pm »

Quote
With the recent limelight that DF has just received, there would be no better time than now for Toady to approach other indy gaming companies with the idea of self advertising within the genre on each others' web pages.

Sure that would make perfect sense.

If he was selling Dwarf Fortress

Err, he is selling Dwarf Fortress.  He might not be selling it for a firm up-front cost of X, but there is most certainly a creator / consumer relationship here.  That's where Toady's money comes from, whether you call it donations or voluntary payment for a cool game.

Yeah, just like how charities sell helping the needy, and you pay for Xbox games at GAME with an honesty box.

Toady & crew make a game, give it to us, and we donate to Bay12.  Without the donations, the game would get little support because people would have to do something else for a living.  I'm not sure what's so complex about this economic scenario.  Toady is selling you the game for whatever YOU think it's worth.  Presumeably, if you spend a great deal of time playing it and getting enjoyment from it, you will make some sort of a donation, at least once.

Most companies can't survive using such a scenario for payment.  Bay12games apparently can, due to the sheer quality of what they produce, and the immense fun value.

It's also extremely obvious by perusing the roleplaying and other games forums that we aren't all DF-and-DF-only people here.  Spreading the net to make more people aware of indy developer games would not be a bad thing in general, I don't think, but that's not a decision for me, nor for you.  If Bay12 is going to forever remain a little island in the gaming market, so be it, but don't think that our relationship with Toady is anything other than a producer / consumer relationship that only exists because some consumers pay the producer.
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Footkerchief

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #64 on: August 08, 2011, 09:35:22 pm »

Toady & crew make a game, give it to us, and we donate to Bay12.  Without the donations, the game would get little support because people would have to do something else for a living.  I'm not sure what's so complex about this economic scenario.  Toady is selling you the game for whatever YOU think it's worth.  Presumeably, if you spend a great deal of time playing it and getting enjoyment from it, you will make some sort of a donation, at least once.

That's not what selling means.  A sale means that a discrete service or item gets exchanged for money.  There is no service or item that gets provided to donators by Bay 12, except for donation rewards like the ASCII art, crayon drawings, and sponsored animals.  You could make a case that those are being sold, but the development of the game itself is not a service for sale.
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Buttery_Mess

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #65 on: August 09, 2011, 03:25:49 am »

Yes... listen to the Mycon...

Perhaps, if he were to plant spore sacs in your brain organ and let its tendrils spread through your flesh then you would truly understand Juffo-Wup... become part of Juffo-Wup. You WOULD be happier and more fulfilled. Consider our offer.
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But .... It's so small!
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Capntastic

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #66 on: August 09, 2011, 03:57:44 am »

When *silly cows* want to bring *unpleasant combinations* to my *house* it makes me *frumple*
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dragonshardz

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #67 on: August 09, 2011, 04:19:01 am »

As long as the ads are kept unobtrusive, I wouldn't be averse. For an example of a site that does a bad job at keeping their ads unobtrusive, go check out sc4devotion.com. I'm a longtime user there, and they have the fackin' 'uge ads for the Subscriptor program after every. fackin'. post on the forums.

Mechanoid

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #68 on: August 09, 2011, 04:43:36 am »

I've heard secondhand (but from a source I trust) quite a bit about malware getting transmitted via stuff like banner ads, even without people clicking on them which is my main thought against them.
This is not just mere rumor, this DOES happen when ad companies don't closely monitor what their customers are putting in banner ads.

I should know, because i've dealt with the fucking things at least twice from the Something Awful forums (while reading the Dwarf Fortress LP/Mega threads, too) which put an .exe that hijacks all program executions (direct .exe use or their shortcuts) to pop up with a copy cat window that's some half-assed attempt at replicating the apperance of a genuine security warning from a certain popular antivirus program. Usually asking you to download some bullshit file that's obviously a keylogger or trojan or worse. (fortunetly i'm smarter then that) What i had to do in order to bypass the script the banner ad gave me when it loaded, i used a .bat file to open the command prompt and then execute the antivirus program using the MSfuckinDOS interface.
... One malwarebytes anti-malware scan and 4 hours of my time later the computer is clean and usable again; and the SA forums don't get visited again for a week after that bullshit, either.

Fuck banner ads for making web pages more difficult to navigate, fuck banner ad companies for wasting everyones' bandwidth, and fuck banner ad company customers that put script kiddie viruses in their fucking ads.

edit-
Central banks create money by loaning it at interest. They also print a small fraction of this money (most money is virtual). Because this is the only source of money, debt is necessarily always greater than available money; so it can't be paid off. This requires defaults to occur, and the seizure of property. It's a method of transfer of wealth (capital) to large financial institutions. The end result is that all capital will in actuality be owned by a handful of private individuals; the obvious endgame of capitalism.
Just like it's simulated in dwarf fortress!

...  :'( Fuck this gay earth capitalism.
« Last Edit: August 09, 2011, 04:48:49 am by Mechanoid »
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Makbeth

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #69 on: August 09, 2011, 01:02:46 pm »

I've heard secondhand (but from a source I trust) quite a bit about malware getting transmitted via stuff like banner ads, even without people clicking on them which is my main thought against them.
This is not just mere rumor, this DOES happen when ad companies don't closely monitor what their customers are putting in banner ads.

I should know, because i've dealt with the fucking things at least twice from the Something Awful forums (while reading the Dwarf Fortress LP/Mega threads, too) which put an .exe that hijacks all program executions (direct .exe use or their shortcuts) to pop up with a copy cat window that's some half-assed attempt at replicating the apperance of a genuine security warning from a certain popular antivirus program. Usually asking you to download some bullshit file that's obviously a keylogger or trojan or worse. (fortunetly i'm smarter then that) What i had to do in order to bypass the script the banner ad gave me when it loaded, i used a .bat file to open the command prompt and then execute the antivirus program using the MSfuckinDOS interface.
... One malwarebytes anti-malware scan and 4 hours of my time later the computer is clean and usable again; and the SA forums don't get visited again for a week after that bullshit, either.

Fuck banner ads for making web pages more difficult to navigate, fuck banner ad companies for wasting everyones' bandwidth, and fuck banner ad company customers that put script kiddie viruses in their fucking ads.

edit-
Central banks create money by loaning it at interest. They also print a small fraction of this money (most money is virtual). Because this is the only source of money, debt is necessarily always greater than available money; so it can't be paid off. This requires defaults to occur, and the seizure of property. It's a method of transfer of wealth (capital) to large financial institutions. The end result is that all capital will in actuality be owned by a handful of private individuals; the obvious endgame of capitalism.
Just like it's simulated in dwarf fortress!

...  :'( Fuck this gay earth capitalism.

Dammit, I was hoping I was just being paranoid by never accepting my software's requests to update and always going to the web site to download the updates manually.  Also was hoping I was being paranoid in my reluctance to go to places like SA or Cracked.com.

And SA has those "please disable your ad blocker" placeholders too, as if we're the assholes.  Hell, they charge for membership and have ads up, if they need more than that I'd say they're doing something wrong.

I miss 2006.  Built myself a gaming rig, with my sole security precaution being a router firewall, and took it all over the internet, to forums, to mod sites, downloading things left and right, and when I thought a driver error was a virus a year later, I bought Norton (yes, I know, I uninstalled it after less than a year) and it showed a perfectly clean system.  Still doesn't mean it was really clean but if I did that today for a year, half the processes running on my machine would be malware.  Fuck the rise of online crime. 
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lordnincompoop

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #70 on: August 09, 2011, 01:11:26 pm »

I wouldn't mind at all if he adds banner ads. The thing is, however, I don't think the click revenue would cover or even break even on the loss in voluntary donations (both from "ugh, ads" and "he's got ads, so he doesn't need me"). The game is obscure enough that there aren't many visitors coming in anyways, and putting ads on the site/forums doesn't look like a successful endeavour.

Virus threats are and have been a minor concern when it comes to ads. Sure, there's an unscrupulous few that allows anything to be inserted into their banners, but I very much doubt that they're the majority, and I doubt even more that Toady would actually allow something like that on his site.

Most banner ads these days, like Google Adsense typically only pay money for clicks, and not really enough to be very useful on a forum.  Spamming clicks to try to boost payments is also a really good way to get Toady blacklisted from, say, AdSense or anything.

I agree with this here.
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Capntastic

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #71 on: August 10, 2011, 12:11:11 am »

And SA has those "please disable your ad blocker" placeholders too, as if we're the assholes.  Hell, they charge for membership and have ads up, if they need more than that I'd say they're doing something wrong.

I really don't think it's wrong to make a profit enough to live off of, especially when you're maintaining one of the internet's larger and well maintained 'cultural' hubs.  The majority of ads on the SA forums are actually paid for by SA members and it's pretty much the exact same sort of intra/inter-community resource/project awareness pooling that people in this very thread are saying Toady should pursue.  A quick rundown of the main ads I've been seeing on the SA forum lately:  Ad for goon-run Mount and Blade Server, Goon Minecraft Server, Goon-written eBooks, Goon iphone apps, Goon financial services, Goon run websites and shops, etc.  So yeah, I could maybe understand the rage about asking you not to block ads if you weren't aware that it's pretty much a community service.

So, basically, would you take umbrage if Toady decided to run ads for the community's non-DF related projects, and asked people to be considerate and not to block them?
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Makbeth

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #72 on: August 10, 2011, 02:33:58 am »

And SA has those "please disable your ad blocker" placeholders too, as if we're the assholes.  Hell, they charge for membership and have ads up, if they need more than that I'd say they're doing something wrong.

I really don't think it's wrong to make a profit enough to live off of, especially when you're maintaining one of the internet's larger and well maintained 'cultural' hubs.  The majority of ads on the SA forums are actually paid for by SA members and it's pretty much the exact same sort of intra/inter-community resource/project awareness pooling that people in this very thread are saying Toady should pursue.  A quick rundown of the main ads I've been seeing on the SA forum lately:  Ad for goon-run Mount and Blade Server, Goon Minecraft Server, Goon-written eBooks, Goon iphone apps, Goon financial services, Goon run websites and shops, etc.  So yeah, I could maybe understand the rage about asking you not to block ads if you weren't aware that it's pretty much a community service.

So, basically, would you take umbrage if Toady decided to run ads for the community's non-DF related projects, and asked people to be considerate and not to block them?

When I said they're doing it wrong I meant in a business management sense, not a moral sense.  To me having membership fees and ads at the same time looks like a desperate attempt to stay solvent, but from what you said that's not the whole picture.  I wasn't raging, just assuming that people who've been managing the site for at least a decade didn't know what they were doing.  In  retrospect, probably a hasty conclusion.
« Last Edit: August 10, 2011, 02:40:25 am by Makbeth »
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Diso Faintpuzzles was born in 120.  Although accounts vary it is universally agreed that Diso was chosen by fate as the vanguard of destiny.

In the early spring of 143 Diso began wandering the wilds.

In the early spring of 143 Diso starved to death in the Horn of Striking.

Farmerbob

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #73 on: August 10, 2011, 03:28:16 am »

Toady & crew make a game, give it to us, and we donate to Bay12.  Without the donations, the game would get little support because people would have to do something else for a living.  I'm not sure what's so complex about this economic scenario.  Toady is selling you the game for whatever YOU think it's worth.  Presumeably, if you spend a great deal of time playing it and getting enjoyment from it, you will make some sort of a donation, at least once.

That's not what selling means.  A sale means that a discrete service or item gets exchanged for money.  There is no service or item that gets provided to donators by Bay 12, except for donation rewards like the ASCII art, crayon drawings, and sponsored animals.  You could make a case that those are being sold, but the development of the game itself is not a service for sale.

There are 11 definitions of the verb "sell" and several subdefinitions within many of the main definitions.  I got that from m-w.com if you would care to see.

Sales is not always a direct transfer of X for Y.  Bay12 provides a game.  The people who play that game provide income to Bay12.

There is a term for this in use today.  Donationware.  When you pay Bay12, you are acknowledging that you found the product good enough to buy it, even though you were not forced to pay for it.  I consider this a sales relationship.  A very liberal one, but you are providing payment for services rendered.

However the definition of sales isn't really the question here, and only serves to distract from the thread.
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irdsm

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Re: Does anybody else support putting ads on the forums?
« Reply #74 on: August 10, 2011, 04:11:04 am »

I find it odd that people feel the need to throw this out here as if it's all our responsibility to give Toady permission to put ads up. It's not our choice to make, if Toady felt the need he'd obviously do it or ask the community how they felt. I've heard nothing indicating that Toady is even considering the idea, so why bring it up?

Also, Does anyone support making DF pay to play? Do you guys think that Toady should cut his hair? Should he visit his parents more often? Should Toady find a wife and have children? Should Toady do a complete site redesign? Does anyone support making DF open source?

None of these are our business to decide and it seems a bit presumptuous to make threads like these.

Anyways, on topic I personally find most ads obtrusive and often distasteful, but I use Adblock+ so it wouldn't bother me much.
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