# Can we continue to use your data to tailor ads for you?



## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

lol j/k it doesn't matter which one you choose because it's the law. Have you tried clearing cache btw?


----------



## Lohikaarme (Aug 28, 2013)




----------



## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

@Lohikaarme

Love it lol


----------



## Kilgore Trout (Aug 10, 2014)

Lol I have so many privacy addons that I've never even got that message.


----------



## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

@geraltofrivia

It only shows up for you if you're in Europe. It's related to a new law, only it's not supposed to pop up forever. Also they ignore other European internet stuff here like allowing Europeans to delete their accounts so.... Lol.... Awkward......


----------



## twitchy666 (Apr 21, 2013)

*ha hHa ha ha hHa ha*

ha hHa ha ha hHa ha ha hHa ha ha hHa ha ha hHa ha ha hHa ha ha hHa ha

YOU! YOU!!!
WEEEEE!!!! USSSSSS!! WARRR WAR WARRRRR!!!YOU! YOU!!!
WEEEEE!!!! USSSSSS!! WARRR WAR WARRRRR!!!YOU! YOU!!!
WEEEEE!!!! USSSSSS!! WARRR WAR WARRRRR!!!YOU! YOU!!!
WEEEEE!!!! USSSSSS!! WARRR WAR WARRRRR!!!YOU! YOU!!!
WEEEEE!!!! USSSSSS!! WARRR WAR WARRRRR!!!YOU! YOU!!!
WEEEEE!!!! USSSSSS!! WARRR WAR WARRRRR!!!YOU! YOU!!!
WEEEEE!!!! USSSSSS!! WARRR WAR WARRRRR!!!

plankton

MY NAME IS NOT "YOU" MY NAME IS NOT "MR YOU"

MY NAME IS NOT "YES" NOT A YESSER. NOT A NO'ER

My vocabulary contains > HELL OH


----------



## Kilgore Trout (Aug 10, 2014)

Persephone The Dread said:


> @geraltofrivia
> 
> It only shows up for you if you're in Europe. It's related to a new law, only it's not supposed to pop up forever. Also they ignore other European internet stuff here like allowing Europeans to delete their accounts so.... Lol.... Awkward......


But I AM in Europe. 
Previously I had to be in Europe because SAS was blocked in Iran for god knows why so I had to use a VPN.
After they installed HTTPS I was hoping the blocking would stop but then I was faced with Google's blocking because they've moved to Google cloud and Google (and almost everywhere else) blocks Iranians from most things.
We can't even download flash player, a key ingredient in making nuclear weapons which we totally are making because we're so advanced.

Don't I live in a magnificent world?

PS: I know about the new law and I do get the message on other sites but not on SAS. I don't know why. Probably something Google related because everywhere I go my location is recognized as Netherlands(my server is in Netherlands) but Google sites recognize me as Russian for some reason.

*grabs Vodka*


----------



## 0589471 (Apr 21, 2012)

geraltofrivia said:


> Probably something Google related because everywhere I go my location is recognized as Netherlands(my server is in Netherlands) but Google sites recognize me as Russian for some reason.
> 
> *grabs Vodka*


za zdaróvye *raises glass* lol


----------



## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

geraltofrivia said:


> But I AM in Europe.
> Previously I had to be in Europe because SAS was blocked in Iran for god knows why so I had to use a VPN.
> After they installed HTTPS I was hoping the blocking would stop but then I was faced with Google's blocking because they've moved to Google cloud and Google (and almost everywhere else) blocks Iranians from most things.
> We can't even download flash player, a key ingredient in making nuclear weapons which we totally are making because we're so advanced.
> ...


Oh I didn't know that, that does suck. It's weird that you still get it in other places I really wonder what they did on this site that's messed it up so much.


----------



## Paper Samurai (Oct 1, 2009)

geraltofrivia said:


> Lol I have so many privacy addons that I've never even got that message.












Same here, but SAS is a little janky sometimes for me because I don't think they intended for half the scripts to be disabled.


----------



## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

Lohikaarme said:


>


lol.

Genuinely curious how much this site brings in and whether they might be willing to sell it. It seems they don't give the slightest **** about it.

Probably would be an insane time to take on a forum as a business though.


----------



## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

BeardedMessiahBob said:


> lol.
> 
> Genuinely curious how much this site brings in and whether they might be willing to sell it. It seems they don't give the slightest **** about it.
> 
> Probably would be an insane time to take on a forum as a business though.


Someone made a post about this recently actually:

https://www.socialanxietysupport.co...as-better-1961057/index31.html#post1093366011


----------



## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

Persephone The Dread said:


> Someone made a post about this recently actually:
> 
> https://www.socialanxietysupport.co...as-better-1961057/index31.html#post1093366011


Yeh, I'm out then lol.


----------



## truant (Jul 4, 2014)

Lohikaarme said:


>


This is the best thing I've seen in a really long time.


----------



## MCHB (Jan 1, 2013)

I honestly refuse to internet without an adblocker lol.


----------



## KILOBRAVO (Sep 17, 2011)

ive just logged in for the first time in about 2 weeks and that stupid ad thing has finally stopped. i didnt do anything to the browser.


----------



## harrison (Apr 14, 2012)

I have adblocker on my laptop so I never see any ads. (except for a movie channel i use that insists I turn it off - that's very annoying)

I actually looked at SAS the other day on my phone and saw a whole pile of ads. It was strange. Don't think I'll do that again.


----------



## WillYouStopDave (Jul 14, 2013)

It does pose a pretty interesting dilemma, however. Ads pay bills and everyone has bills. People hate ads. The harder advertisers try to bombard people with ads they don't want to see when they don't want to see them, the more people will hate ads EVEN if they are relevant to their interests.

Once advertisers realize that things like forums are a lost cause, the people who run forums will have no income. If they still want to run the forum they will have to fund it because they're just that nice. How long will that last? Who is nice enough to burn money providing a place for people to speak?

Nothing runs on kindness.


----------



## andy0128 (Dec 19, 2003)

Ads are a blight on humanity


----------



## Chevy396 (Jul 10, 2017)

Persephone The Dread said:


> @geraltofrivia
> 
> It only shows up for you if you're in Europe. It's related to a new law, only it's not supposed to pop up forever. Also they ignore other European internet stuff here like allowing Europeans to delete their accounts so.... Lol.... Awkward......


Yeah, cause honestly what are they gonna do?


----------



## Chevy396 (Jul 10, 2017)

geraltofrivia said:


> But I AM in Europe.
> Previously I had to be in Europe because SAS was blocked in Iran for god knows why so I had to use a VPN.
> After they installed HTTPS I was hoping the blocking would stop but then I was faced with Google's blocking because they've moved to Google cloud and Google (and almost everywhere else) blocks Iranians from most things.
> We can't even download flash player, a key ingredient in making nuclear weapons which we totally are making because we're so advanced.
> ...


You probably cant download flash because that's how the Stuxnet virus got into your nuclear program. I'm not sure that's true, but I think it might be.

Edit: nevermind I thought you said you were from Iran. Should have read more carefully.


----------



## Paul (Sep 26, 2005)

WillYouStopDave said:


> Once advertisers realize that things like forums are a lost cause, the people who run forums will have no income. If they still want to run the forum they will have to fund it because they're just that nice. How long will that last? Who is nice enough to burn money providing a place for people to speak?
> 
> Nothing runs on kindness.


I ran a large forum on donations for 13 years, and smaller forums are very cheap to run. It just means there won't be any forums owned by corporate entities like VerticalScope. Considering how little VerticalScope seems to care about things like breaking the site for everyone in Europe, that wouldn't be a bad thing.


----------



## Amphoteric (Sep 11, 2011)

It wasn't something that could be blocked with adblockers.


----------



## WillYouStopDave (Jul 14, 2013)

Paul said:


> I ran a large forum on donations for 13 years, and smaller forums are very cheap to run. It just means there won't be any forums owned by corporate entities like VerticalScope. Considering how little VerticalScope seems to care about things like breaking the site for everyone in Europe, that wouldn't be a bad thing.


 Well, you said you did it for 13 years. That sounds like more time than most people would spend doing that. How many people are there who are willing to do that and how many forums are there that would need people like that? How many people are there who are willing to donate to have a forum? There are people here who expect flawless operation for free.

I'm not saying it's unreasonable to expect a free forum to work but imagine if they were paying money for it and it crashes.

Aside from that, this is about more than just a forum. Everyone who runs anything on the internet is doing it for some reason. Often money. Most people just don't work for free or for fun. I know from experience that free software is only free for as long as the person who created it feels like dealing with it for no pay. There have been several add-ons for Firefox that I used for years and they stopped working because the developer got tired of doing it and just disappeared. Sometimes someone else picks it up where they left off and sometimes not. But if it's something you use every day, you WILL notice when it doesn't work anymore.

The guy who created Classic Shell recently decided he was done. How many millions of people were depending on that guy? I think someone else has picked it up but it was a pretty sobering moment for people who hate the default UI in W8. It still works, of course but if no one else picked it up, for how long would it work?

What kind of forum did you run (just curious)?


----------



## llodell88 (May 15, 2011)

No, stop.


----------



## Paul (Sep 26, 2005)

WillYouStopDave said:


> Well, you said you did it for 13 years. That sounds like more time than most people would spend doing that. How many people are there who are willing to do that and how many forums are there that would need people like that?


Do it as long as you enjoy it, then delegate or pass it on to someone else or sell it or kill it. Nothing lasts forever, but non-commercial forums will often outlast commercial forums since the commercial type get ignored and eventually dumped as soon as they stop turning a sufficient revenue to pay the employees. Websites being run by people who care about them is usually a good thing, and there's way more people out there who care about each imaginable subject than there is room for popular forums.

_How many people are there who are willing to donate to have a forum?_

If you tell them exactly what it'll be spent on, and then you offer them some exclusive incentives, there are enough. People like to feel a sense of ownership in a community. Think about kickstarter and how many people throw gobs of money at things that don't even exist.

_I'm not saying it's unreasonable to expect a free forum to work but imagine if they were paying money for it and it crashes._

In my experience, crashes tend to cause a surge of donations from people who are concerned the forum might go away or want to show their appreciation for the work involved in fixing the problem.

_Aside from that, this is about more than just a forum. Everyone who runs anything on the internet is doing it for some reason. Often money. Most people just don't work for free or for fun. _

Of course. But there are many ways to make money, and if extremely rude and invasive and dangerous forms of advertising stop making money that creates a positive incentive. And if certain categories like forums prove not profitable, so be it, we'll still have plenty of them as long as people still want to come to them (which, honestly, is the much bigger problem for forums -- a generation of phone-based people who don't want to type out long posts). Why waste time worrying about other people's business plans?

_I know from experience that free software is only free for as long as the person who created it feels like dealing with it for no pay._

Eh, I've been running exclusively Linux and free software for the past 15 years and I like it quite a lot. I think the only software I've bought in that time was the Opera web browser (a couple weeks before it went free). A lot of developers of free/libre software are in fact paid by various companies to do it.

And proprietary software really has a much worse record of being suddenly and inexplicably abandoned, because nobody has permission to revive and fix it and it exists at the whim of one company's current strategy. If your classic shell windows thingie were open source it wouldn't be in danger with a user base that big.

_What kind of forum did you run (just curious)?_

The now-defunct PhilosophyForums.com, which I sold for good money to an idiot who turned it into a half-assed commercial venture and killed it (fortunately the entire community migrated to a new non-profit site they started). If the owning business is totally committed to the forum, great. But if they're like a normal business, they're trying to spend as little time and effort as possible... like the Helenas. And if things take a bad turn, they don't hesitate to shut it down because they don't really care and they've got a thousand other forums to manage.


----------



## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

Paul said:


> Do it as long as you enjoy it, then delegate or pass it on to someone else or sell it or kill it. Nothing lasts forever, but non-commercial forums will often outlast commercial forums since the commercial type get ignored and eventually dumped as soon as they stop turning a sufficient revenue to pay the employees. Websites being run by people who care about them is usually a good thing, and there's way more people out there who care about each imaginable subject than there is room for popular forums.
> 
> _How many people are there who are willing to donate to have a forum?_
> 
> ...


Great post.

And a bit of a warning re this community what is likely to happen in the end. Anyone have any ideas re migration when they burn the place?


----------



## andy0128 (Dec 19, 2003)

Paul said:


> I ran a large forum on donations for 13 years, and smaller forums are very cheap to run. It just means there won't be any forums owned by corporate entities like VerticalScope. Considering how little VerticalScope seems to care about things like breaking the site for everyone in Europe, that wouldn't be a bad thing.


How much would it cost per month to run a forum like this or one with around 100 regular posters?


----------



## Paul (Sep 26, 2005)

andy0128 said:


> How much would it cost per month to run a forum like this or one with around 100 regular posters?


There are some forum-specific hosting options like https://plushforums.com/pricing which is what my former forum members went to so that they don't have to / get to manage the server details and can just get on with posting. 100 members online at once there is $50.

(Don't take the numbers SAS shows for members online at once at face value, because they set "at once" to be like 3 hours. Presently I think SAS would fit on the $50 plan.)


----------



## Just Lurking (Feb 8, 2007)

Other than traditional advertising, this place could be monetized through sponsored blogs and posts. Book authors, mental health support sites, online therapists, and pharmaceutical companies would have a vested interest as well.

Also, regarding the linked post I made in the other thread -- those numbers are a few years old. I said they'd be 'slightly lower' now, but you can probably actually cut them by ~50-60% or thereabouts (but the same problems will still apply, proportionally).

I have never heard of VerticalScope selling a website -- only driving them straight into the ground (many, many unfortunate stories about this). The company was worth $350,000,000 in 2015. They reported "growth" in 2017. It would take a substantial amount of money for them to even blink in a would-be buyer's direction.

For the company's decision makers, I suspect that $30,000 (or whatever) wouldn't even be worth the time it takes them to look over an offer. Much easier to just let it die and buy out two or three more to take its place. Six figures could possibly get some attention (especially if 200k+), but again, the problems... And they have to see the sale as more financially beneficial than not. Do they want to hand over sites to people who would become their competition? The price would need to be *very* 'right'.

It's actually a smart business model (for now), but the only ones benefiting from it are their executives and shareholders. These people -- this company -- are literally parasites.

Two things comes to mind that could possibly get them to 'break from tradition': 1) Negative press coverage. But spinning this in our favour and in such a way that it draws enough attention sounds like an impossible task... 2) The drying of resources. How many more viable forums are out there to keep up with the buy-and-kill-and-buy-again strategy? (probably enough to keep them going for... a very long time)


----------



## andy0128 (Dec 19, 2003)

WillYouStopDave said:


> How many people are there who are willing to do that and how many forums are there that would need people like that? How many people are there who are willing to donate to have a forum? There are people here who expect flawless operation for free.
> 
> I'm not saying it's unreasonable to expect a free forum to work but imagine if they were paying money for it and it crashes.


I was on another active forum about a decade ago. Perhaps not quite this size but the running costs were apparently more each month than what Paul was estimating. Quite a lot of members donated, some one time others regularly and the owners footed the remainder of the cost.

It's perfectly reasonable for it to work, but we can't continue to have these notions that the financing aspect is the burden of anyone but ourselves.


----------



## Paper Samurai (Oct 1, 2009)

There was an alternative anxiety forum set up by someone on here a few years back. I'm not sure though if it's still active or if it was even sustainable though.


----------



## Canadian Brotha (Jan 23, 2009)

Ads due to algorithms tracking all my online movements creep me out, even if I find random cool items it just feels invasive


----------



## WillYouStopDave (Jul 14, 2013)

Canadian Brotha said:


> Ads due to algorithms tracking all my online movements creep me out, even if I find random cool items it just feels invasive


 True. But I don't know that there's anything particularly different going on here than there is everywhere else you go. Every time I watch a video on Youtube about anything, "relevant" items pop up as recommended for me on Amazon. Happens too often to be a coincidence too. And I have multiple add ons for blocking ads and tracking and creepy, invasive stuff. Only works for some stuff but doesn't stop everything, obviously.


----------

