• Responding to email notices you receive.
    **************************************************
    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

  • IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!! About the Google Adsense ads being displayed

    =====================
    Posted 08/15/2025
    =====================


    Yeah, I know. They are a pain in the butt. But they pay the bills to keep my server running. Just a fact of life, I am afraid.

    Want to get rid of them? Simple. Just become a Contributor level member or above and they will be gone. -> Please click HERE."

    Is that too much for me to ask of you to keep this site running? Well, sorry about that. I too wish I could get everything for free. But alas.....

    =====================
    Addendum: 01/10/2026
    =====================


    Google Adsense ad revenue for December, 2025 was just $30 over the cost of the lease for the server running this site. So, in effect, the money providing the incentive for me to continue running this site is coming SOLELY from the paid memberships and sponsorships here. Which honestly ain't much....

Change to mobile device appearance/format?

WebSlave said:
Did something happen here to make it difficult for new members to post? In less than a week, we have had 100 new registered members and only one (1) of them has made even a single post on the site.

That is just real unusual, so I'm wondering if something happened that I need to be aware of. :shrug01:
Click to expand...

Of course, I can't speak for others, but I lurked for several months after I registered. Mostly, I was just trying to get a feel for the site and its members, and what the general culture was like. With the BOI gone, maybe folks joined just to view/post classifieds, and may never feel the need to post.
 
Insomniac101 said:
Of course, I can't speak for others, but I lurked for several months after I registered. Mostly, I was just trying to get a feel for the site and its members, and what the general culture was like. With the BOI gone, maybe folks joined just to view/post classifieds, and may never feel the need to post.
Click to expand...

Well, sounds like a good theory, so I went through and did some spot checks of various periods of new registrations in the past to check where those people were posting, and I would have to say that 99% of them posted in the classifieds section, whether responding to an existing ad, or starting one of their own. And those areas I checked were AFTER the BOI had been closed.

So I tend to think that the closing of the BOI has nothing to do with this recent phenomenon.

BTW, I was talking about posting on the entire site, which does include the classifieds sections. Basically zip for postings from those new registrations.
 
FYI, I asked my programmer to remove the Adsense Auto-ads code, as I think it may have been chasing people away with the intrusive ads. But I intent to monitor things to see how it goes. If it doesn't make any difference in traffic either way, but knocks back the income from the Adsense ads substantially, then I will ask my programmer to re-implement it.

So if anyone has any comments pro, con, or neutral about this stuff, please chime in here. I would rather make decisions based on some input, but wouldn't be the first time I have just bitten the bullet to see what happens.
 
I don't have a computer, only an iPad and I hate it 😂😂😂. "Request desktop site" only stays active for a short period of time. It has been really cumbersome for me to be on, I understand that it's my choice to not buy/use a computer.
 
Beyond GenetiX said:
I don't have a computer, only an iPad and I hate it ������. "Request desktop site" only stays active for a short period of time. It has been really cumbersome for me to be on, I understand that it's my choice to not buy/use a computer.
Click to expand...

So what exactly do you hate? Was it better here before the mod was done to try to make this site more "mobile friendly", or the site in general from the very beginning accessing it via your mobile device?

Personally I just hate accessing the internet at all via my smart phone, but that is just me. So I just don't do it. At all.
 
Beyond GenetiX said:
I don't have a computer, only an iPad and I hate it 😂😂😂. "Request desktop site" only stays active for a short period of time. It has been really cumbersome for me to be on, I understand that it's my choice to not buy/use a computer.
Click to expand...
For ipad, mobile skin isn't suppose to kick in. I tweaked it a little, please check now.
 
WebSlave said:
So what exactly do you hate? Was it better here before the mod was done to try to make this site more "mobile friendly", or the site in general from the very beginning accessing it via your mobile device?

Personally I just hate accessing the internet at all via my smart phone, but that is just me. So I just don't do it. At all.
Click to expand...


The mobile skin on iPad, every second reply in the thread was an ad or blank for the most of the page, then another reply.


Logician said:
For ipad, mobile skin isn't suppose to kick in. I tweaked it a little, please check now.
Click to expand...

This is much better now, makes me feel like I'm home again. I know I'm not the only user but it was rough for me.
 
It seems much better for me too. I was having the same issues as Jason was, but on my phone, not an iPad.

It was getting annoying to be bounced back to the "mobile" log-in page every time I clicked on any thread. Sometimes, I would click on a thread, and would get a full-page ad. But mostly, it would direct me back to the mobile version log-in screen.

Thanks for looking into it, and making some adjustments. Much better; for me, anyway. :)
 
WebSlave said:
FYI, I asked my programmer to remove the Adsense Auto-ads code, as I think it may have been chasing people away with the intrusive ads. But I intent to monitor things to see how it goes. If it doesn't make any difference in traffic either way, but knocks back the income from the Adsense ads substantially, then I will ask my programmer to re-implement it.

So if anyone has any comments pro, con, or neutral about this stuff, please chime in here. I would rather make decisions based on some input, but wouldn't be the first time I have just bitten the bullet to see what happens.
Click to expand...

Well, FYI, things have really nosedived with the Google Adsense income after my programmer disabled the autoads thing, so I have asked him to re-enable it. Income is less than a third of what it was prior. :ack2:

This might not be the entire reason for the significant drop in Adsense revenue, though, as quite likely this COVID-19 issue is also taking it's toll here in a number of ways. As people lose their jobs, or the fear thereof, paid memberships and paying advertisers will certainly drop like a rock. Even general participation here will likely drop off substantially as I believe many people tend to use the networks where they work for a substantial portion of their internet browsing. And are people really going to be interested in viewing ads of animals and products that they can not really afford to invest in right now?

So it behooves me, I believe, to not disable anything that might bring in even a little bit of extra income for this site for as long as it works as it was designed. I apologize if this causes people heartburn with their viewing this site on their mobile devices. I wish the world were just perfect for everyone, but obviously that is not the case. So I just have to make the best decisions I can, with everything I can think of in mind.
 
FYI, I asked my programmer to disable all Google Adsense ads for all paid levels of memberships, which should include Sponsors too. This was done about a week ago, but I wanted to monitor the revenue change in Adsense to make sure this is a reasonable thing for me to do, before making a public announcement about it.

There wasn't too big of a change in revenue, so I'm hoping that this might spur more members into becoming paying members to compensate for the minor loss this will cost me.

Unfortunately I forgot to ask him to disable the ads for me........ :face_palm_02:

But I guess I should monitor them anyway, so what the heck. Doesn't seem to kick in much with my desktop computer viewing anyway.
 
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