Please ATS Members and Non-Members alike, STOP Blocking Ads- Or there may be NO ATS at ALL

a reply to: Stormdancer777
Wasn't responding to you, whoever you are...

a reply to: TrueAmerican

ATS = sellout

Shut it down. The 25 liberals that live here will have to leave their safe space and see how they stack up in the real world. It's not surprising the owners think they deserve a big paycheck for nothing that's typical liberal stuff. Wins all around. Time to get a job SO.

How do all you who "donated" to the site feel knowing you're just paying for big dogs vacations?

a reply to: TrueAmerican

THIS SITE IS BIG AND IT TAKES A LOT OF RESOURCES TO KEEP RUNNING.

A. I have never seen more than 300 or so people logged in ever conspiracy is dead bud , So is myspace etc etc everything has been done over and over and over .

Time to cut costs like every company has been doing or find a sugar daddy for the site or sell 49% of it to investers

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Personally I don't think anyone knows what they're talking about besides you and Ante.

This site screams 2016.

Every other forum I've visited, besides Quora, looks like they were made in 1990 and never reenergised or adapted.

Again, I don't think anyone realises the quality of this Forum compared to the million other trashy looking sites they visit.

Not to mention the amount of data you're storing with, as you said, pictures etc.

2million threads stored and backed up?

And people are complaining about not having to follow T&Cs.


Entitled or what.

a reply to: Mtlimo

You again.

originally posted by: stonerwilliam
I have never seen more than 300 or so people logged in ever conspiracy is dead bud

My informative post at the bottom of the previous page may be getting lost. So here it is again, to provide some clarity...


A bit more than a year ago, we engaged a professional IT management firm to review our full stack and recommend the most cost-effective hosting option, as well as optimization strategies for the stack. Most of the code optimizations have been either tested and discarded (trying to cache mysql queries was a disaster) or deployed. And we are running on robust but relatively inexpensive dedicated server. I have a low threshold for logging slow db queries, and check it regularly... there hasn't been any for months, so the code is well-optimized.

When people say, this site could be hosted for X, they typically don't consider some of the unexpected items for sites with more than four million distinct pages. One such item is search engine bots. On some days, more than half our overall total traffic can be non-human indexing agents, and it's never less than 30%. Looking at the live log right now, of the last 100 lines of access (which represents less than the last 5 seconds of activity), 70 are indexing agents. Each of those lines of the log from indexing agents is accessing a different thread page... that alone is 70 different queries against a database of 1+ million threads and 20+ million posts in less than 5 seconds.

Using our stats, we approached AWS, The Planet, and SoftLayer for quotes on a VPS solution. No one came in under $3,000/month. Google App Engine may have been a possible alternative, but looking at the datastore and processing cost estimates, it was going to be well over $2,000 a month. So it was more cost-effective to hire a professional IT firm to customize a high-performance dedicated server specific to our needs.

Like many others, I don't pay attention to ADs so blocking them makes little difference.

The best form of advertising is a good product or service.

I believe that if a business focus' more on the customers needs instead of the bottom line, there would BE no need for advertising.

Advertisers, if you actually think your ads are influencing me you are 100% deluded.

Or there may be NO ATS at ALL

The amount of ignorance I see peddled here everyday; and the long running degradation of discussion and rampant polarized bull# tells me that might not be such a great loss anymore.

originally posted by: Iamnotadoctor
a reply to: Stormdancer777
Wasn't responding to you, whoever you are...

i realize

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

Time to find a sugar daddy for the site s/o or for everyone to find a work round for this , what about selling a piece of this site to someone

.

Wish i could be of more help for the years of fun i have have here

originally posted by: Mtlimo
Shut it down. The 25 liberals that live here will have to leave their safe space and see how they stack up in the real world. It's not surprising the owners think they deserve a big paycheck for nothing that's typical liberal stuff. Wins all around. Time to get a job SO.

How do all you who "donated" to the site feel knowing you're just paying for big dogs vacations?

stack up in the real world???.....i'm sure you can find one of the thousands of right-wing websites that you can go on, and not have your pre-conceived notions challenged.

a reply to: TrueAmerican

DUDE! you got me scared, now i am paranoid, happy now?
I will make a deal, let me speak freely about the one thing, that i have mountains upon mountain of valuable information- subject: ancient mushroom cults and ancient rituals- that all contain--

(SNIP)
(USER BANNED FOREVER)

Then i will gladly take all the ads you can throw at me.

Change the T(L)C!

a reply to: Stormdancer777

Helpful in what way ?

Or do you think his alarmist, higher than thou, pompous and condescending attitude is helpful to any of us ?

S&F grabbing is exactly what he's doing otherwise he could have quite easily have given his 2 cents in Skeptics thread which every user of the site already knows about thanks to the warning popup that appears at the bottom of the site and any adblock users would know about thanks to the adblock message.

There's absolutely no need for TA to raise "awareness" when everybody is already aware, he just wanted HIS opinion to be heard louder than everyone else in Skeptics thread by creating his own thread, the guy is literally the Daily Mail in human form.

Good god, with all the reaction around here about this you'd think SO asked everybody to sign their house over to him, all over please turn Adblock off while using the site so they get ad money.

It's a well put together site that is easy to navigate. Glance at a dam add now and then people, he even said clicking on them isn't even necessary.

a reply to: SkepticOverlord

You know what would be a good start?
Censor threads like this.
A thread like this is redundant.
Do you want to open the floodgates and have every clown on here making a thread about all of this?
Star and flag whoring, and the lameness of it....

my biggest beef is being called a thief and that im takin food off of SO's table because i use an ad blocker that right there is what i think alot of people are the most upset about. i undertand where SO is comming from, but come on man that was pretty harsh equating ad block users with criminal thiefs....

I have no doubt ATS costs a lot of money to run. Plus salary for the people who work on the site. Plus the money it takes to produce original non member generated content.

A site of this size needs revenue to stick around. What ATS has become can not be strictly free. ATS has grown beyond being a small forum. It needs ad revenue or donations or subscriptions. It needs to keep evolving to survive. To do that it needs money.

Whether you like what ATS has become and is becoming is a separate question.

originally posted by: Iamnotadoctor
a reply to: SkepticOverlord

You know what would be a good start?
Censor threads like this.
A thread like this is redundant.
Do you want to open the floodgates and have every clown on here making a thread about all of this?
Star and flag whoring, and the lameness of it....

You should make a thread asking for people to stop making threads!!

originally posted by: Rabb420
that was pretty harsh equating ad block users with criminal thiefs....

Not really. Some additional clarity...

Back in 2002, an enterprising person was buying stacks of NYC newspapers, ripping out most of the ads and inserts, then reselling the "slimmed down" versions to people entering the subway. He was charging 50 cents more than the cover price.

He was arrested, and spent time in jail for criminal copyright violation.


There is caselaw in the US and Europe that specifies the HTML structure of a web page is a copyright protected asset of the publisher and/or creator.

In France, Germany and the UK, class action lawsuits are being started against the ad-blocking companies for criminal copyright violation. The case is relatively strong, the ad-blocking firms are profiting from modifying a copyright protected item without permission from the copyright holder.

There's rumors of similar class action suits in the US, but the IAB is trying to negotiate an alternative first.


The extortion of the ad-blocking firms have also recently caught the attention of district attorneys in the US. In NY, an investigation is supposed to be in progress.


There is strong evidence that much of what the ad-blockers do is in violation of more than one law.



It's not that harsh then, is it?