I am sorry! (A note about the ads)

[Scott Greczkowski]

The past few days quite a few of our members and guests have had trouble getting pages loaded here at SatelliteGuys. I was unaware of this issue until I read about a few other websites also having the same issue. When I logged out and checked here at SatelliteGuys we had the same "waiting for tag.contextweb.com" problem that the other sites we having. I immediately worked and removed all the code for that ad agency.

This made the pages load again however I noticed another problem with another one of our ad agencies (SayMedia) and that they were serving ads that had auto playing audio. I contacted SayMedia support and our SayMedia rep and have not received a reply from them. SayMedia seems to have a serious problem, besides serving this ads which is against our agreement with them, they are also serving the wrong size ads, and sometimes serving two or three ads in one ad space! Sometimes you couldn't even see these auto playing audio / video ads because they were hidden behind other ads!

Because of this issue I have also removed ads being served by SayMedia and will not return them until they have this issue fixed. If you would like to see what some of these ads looked and sounded like please check out http://www.satelliteguys.us/say300x250.html and keep refreshing the page. (Be on the lookout for the ones that look like they are loading games) you will see how annoying these ads are.

It was hard to remove the SayMedia ads as SayMedia makes up about 60% of our income here at SatelliteGuys, but removing them was the right thing to do for you our members and guest.

I work hard to try giving everyone who visits SatelliteGuys the best experience possible on every visit... and this time I failed you and for that I am sorry. I don't want the ads to scare people away.

To show you how sorry we are, I am asking any registered member who had issues with the ads to PM's me between now and 11:59PM ET on Monday October 1st and I will give them a FREE 7 day Pub Membership which will get rid of all the ads for the next 7 days and will give you all the perks of being a Pub Member. (Note I will be in and out this weekend, so it make take me a few hours to activate your pub membership.)

Again I am sorry and ask all members that if you see an issue like this or an ad that should not be here please PM me and let me know so I can take care of the issue as soon as possible. As I said earlier I don't want to scare people off with the ads. We got to run the ads to pay our bills, however at no time should loud obnoxious ads pop up on your screen.

Again my apologies!

Thank you for being SatelliteGuys

 

[Teehar]

Never noticed any of those ads being a pub member,I did see a couple of posts complaining about the audio ads.Anyway,very nice gesture Scott.

 

[jevans64]

These invasive audio ads are the sole reason I browse with the PC speakers turned off. The AdChoices stuff doesn't bother me at all since they are usually on the far right side away from the actual post text. The Amazon ads just show me stuff I already browsed for or bought after recent visits to Amazon. They are small and don't bother me since I have lots of screen real estate.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Yeah but I don't like sound ads.. I don't like popups... I don't like pop unders.

As I said the ads are here to pay the bills not to scare people away.

I am still working with SayMedia on getting rid of their automatic sound/video ads, so they are still shut off. As I mentioned they are our highest paying ad network so it hurts to have them shut off, and we are going on 4 days now. But I would rather do that then subject you guys to these CRAP ads.

Tonight I noticed that the Facebook Connect feature has been turned off, this is due to the fact that it was causing page load time issues. I will keep an eye on it and turn it back on once Facebook fixes whatever is wrong on their end.

 

[Kraven]

A small inconvenience for such a great site.

Cheers,K

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

A small inconvenience for such a great site.

Only I didn't consider it a small inconvenience, I considered it a big one. When people couldn't get pages fully loaded... or they got the page loaded, but got blasted by loud audio out of their speakers and had these annoying audio ads that you couldn't see or they kept reloading every 10 seconds then to me that is a BIG inconvenience.

I don't want to scare people away, I just want to pay the bills.

I have been working close with the ad agency since yesterday and they have been hard at work. I am happy to report the sound issues are now gone, but there are still a few outstanding issues they are working on. Once they have those fixed I will return their ad code. This problem cost us a lot of money, but to me removing the bad ads was the right thing to do for our members and guest.

 

[Peter Parker]

Thanks. scott. i know you are foregoing some immediate revenue for the enjoyment of your members and potemntial members. I know that some were turned off by those ads so hopefully this will help to build membership and revenue in the long term.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Thanks Chief!

I am smart enough to understand that with no members there is no SatelliteGuys.

 

[king3pj]

Scott, I am not trying to step on you or your advertiser's toes here so feel free to remove this post if you think it will hurt your relationship with advertisers. Ok, the disclaimer is there so here is my point....

There is a free firefox add on called Adblock Plus. This is a great tool for firefox users to make the web more enjoyable and speedy. It automatically blocks all the annoying banner ads. It also blocks those full screen ads that require you to watch for 30 seconds before continuing to the next article on websites like IGN.com. It does allow text ads like the one that loads above your gmail inbox.

Again, I posted this because I think most members would find this useful for all their web browsing. I completely understand if you want to remove this post from your website though.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I think everyone knows about ad blockers, but if everyone uses them then there is no more SatelliteGuys, it's that simple.

Besides blocking ads it also blocks some of our code which is needed to render the site and also breaks certain AJAX features including the message editor. So it actually causes the site to act weird, load slower and sometimes look strange for those using ad blockers.

Besides that I have the ability to block those using ad blockers from reading posts, but I don't want to do that as I understand why some people use them, but will do it if we have to because we have to pay the bills. We serve a HALF MILLION unique IP addresses a month using 3 servers, plus 18 cloud servers and we pay for all the data we send out which is not cheap.

So use them if you must, but THANK YOU if your not.

 

[king3pj]

I think everyone knows about ad blockers, but if everyone uses them then there is no more SatelliteGuys, it's that simple.

Besides blocking ads it also blocks some of our code which is needed to render the site and also breaks certain AJAX features including the message editor. So it actually causes the site to act weird, load slower and sometimes look strange for those using ad blockers.

Besides that I have the ability to block those using ad blockers from reading posts, but I don't want to do that as I understand why some people use them, but will do it if we have to because we have to pay the bills. We serve a HALF MILLION unique IP addresses a month using 3 servers, plus 18 cloud servers and we pay for all the data we send out which is not cheap.

So use them if you must, but THANK YOU if your not.

I have been using it for years and never had a problem with your website. That being said, you can unblock individual websites if you want and I am more than willing to unblock yours. I leave it on by default because the ads on some websites, like the IGN example I mentioned, are very intrusive. I don't feel that the ads on satelliteguys fit that description.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

The ads are all fixed now. No more auto audio ads. No ads that take over your screen, and no popups.

And all the ads now are asyncronis or served in iframes, meaning they don't slow down the rest of the site while loading.

Thanks for everyones patience.