Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Updates
The formkey bug that was wreaking havoc all weekend was fixed. It was a mistake in seeding rand that was causing a small percentage of users to have problems posting. It wasn't a conspiracy designed to thwart anyone, just you. Man it was a pain in the ass. But it was squashed on Sunday (thank god).
Anonymous Coward filtering is now in place. It's not exactly finished, but it'll do for now. Essentially there is now a user preference that sets all AC posts to -1. This has been a very common user request for some time, so turn it on if you like. It's currently off by default. It's only a baby step: eventually there will be more fine-tuned controls for anonymous posts, as well as comment types. For Example: I'd personally like to assign a -2 penalty on any comment rated 'funny' because most of them frankly just aren't funny at all. But humor is far too subjective to say that the moderation is unfair. Anyway, now everyone can decide for themselves. That should happen in the next few weeks.
Last up, I'm gonna talk a little about advertisements and subscriptions. Slashdot continues to grow: our traffic has increased by like 10% in the last few months, and simply selling the banner ads you see on top of each page isn't going to be enough to keep us afloat if we keep growing. And selling banner ads in 2001 is an awful lot harder then it was in 1999.
The change will be a different ad size on the article page. Currently we have the standard banner size on top of all pages, but soon the article pages will instead have those huge square things that you see on CNet or ZD. I know this will be unpopular with many people, myself included, but when we make the switch, we will also have some sort of subscription system where you can pay a fee to disable them honestly. (No I don't know how much yet!)
Just to shut down the conspiracy theorists, nobody is forcing us to make these changes: The navbar. The new ad formats. The subscription system. I could just say 'No' to changes like these. But Slashdot is now four years old ... and I want it to still be here four years from now. I hope you can understand the expensive reality associated with making this site happen every day for a quarter of a million readers.
Now flame me if you feel it necessary. Get it out of your system.
Most slashdotters are advocates about retaining their privacy and personal information. Yet when it comes to other peoples privacy, ie Anonymous Cowards, it's just unacceptable. Those same people want the Anonymous Cowards modded down. Maybe someone posting as an Anonymous Coward has no choice. If they need to post something negative about the company they work at or an opinion they don't want people to know is theirs, then they have to post anonymously.
Things need to work both ways here. Now go ahead and mod me down for "trolling".
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
But instead I'd like to just point out that Slashdot is an amazing accomplishment, and everyone who keeps it running deserves to get paid for it. The only people that will bitch about the (potential) subscription cost are the same ones whose posts I never read anyway.
--Mid
I am an avid slashdot reader. I get more quality reading material out of slashdot than alot of the magazines I subscribe to (ok, it doesn't beat playboy, but what does...).
I personally have no problem paying a subscription fee.
And to start the flames off, that navbar really really sucks. What a dirty little trick to try to boost revenue at thinkgeek...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Deal with it people. If
I think the people above me are having sex - or they're sleeping restlessly and agreeing with each other a lot.
OK, reality has finally hit the last corner of the internet, /.
/. far more then the edotor of any print newspaper.
/. would only get rid of Jon Katz, I'd be really happy. That was not intended as humor. Fortunatly i can just ignore his stories, so I tend to not complain too loudly. I wouldn't complain at all, but I'm sure he's sucking valuable resources from /.
I like slashdot, there I said it. It is like any other news source, and it need to make money. After years of readership, I actually trust the people who run
/. need to get money, and quit frankly I have no problems with putting an ad in a story. hhhm who else does that, let me think, oh yeah every newspaper oin the last 100 years. how many of you flame the newspaper because they dare sell advertising space?
/. has problems, and run stuff I don't like from time to time, but most of the time its interesting.
Pop-up ads I have a problem with. many employers will track that has more surfing.
/. has finally done something I've wanted for years, and I can finally get rid of those darn AC comments.
Now if
Bottom line: Good Job, keep up the good work, can't wait to see how the next four years go!"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Those big mid-page ads on CNET are why I don't go there anymore.
.. saves the editors from marking it -1 Offtopic, I guess.
I'm curious if you avoid reading the newspaper or magazines. Those tend have big mid-page ads too.
Oh, well, you've probably crammed this AC post below your threshold
In the interest of keeping slashdot alive and profitable, I'll be the first to suggest that the user info section should be expanded to all users to include more detailed self profiles (ie: gender, hobbies, job title, income, etc...) purely for the purpose of advertising.
No, I don't really want that info showing up on my public page. Yes, it would suck if slashdot sold that info to spammers -- but Rob & Taco have earned my respect over the years, I don't mind giving that info out to a site I respect if the plus side is that they can make twice as much per Ad impression, and the downside is that the Ads I see are more specific for me.
(It's not like my Topics prefs and slashbox customizations don't allready create a tight profile of my interests)
-- The Hoss Man
Same here. Slash dot is one of the few places I allow the ads to come through on. Anything more obtrusive then the banner ads will cause me to block them.
I would consider paying a subscription but it damn well be a payment on the order of what they lose from my not viewing the ads to begin with, ie no more then a few dollars a year (by that I mean 1 or 2), anything more then they aren't trying to recoup the lost ad revenue but are instead trying to make me pay for everyone elses use. I'm simply not willing to pay $20 or $30 a year for a dozen different web sites becuase they all discover suddenly that banner ads aren't cutting it (though they should point out to their advertisers that paying based on click through or some such is ludicris, newspaper, broadcast, bill boards etc are about building brand recognition and they don't expect everyone that sees an ad to suddenly visit the show room).
Be interesting to see how this all shakes out:)
You could also do what the register does, and have stories "sponsored" by certain companies with their color scheme and logo incorporated, etc. Or have companies sponsor sections in this way for a day or two, or a week or two.
You could also have half height ads on the main page, in the spaces between the stories.
So there are lots of options before doing the big ass boxes in the stories
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Try thinking of it as paying for the lack of something... I already donate once or twice a year to a college station (KVCU in Boulder) partly because I can't stomach the crappy programming on the various commercial stations around, but also because (except for 20 days a year for pledge drives) they don't run ads.
Unless the cost is prohibitive, I'm willing to pay for the absence of banners...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
What OSDN bar?
Oh, but then again, I do browse text only.
I hope that'd work for the big banners too. =) Pleeeeeese?
Hey, I understand about all the ads, but how about a look and feel update to /. ? I'd say it's well overdue.
Any plans?
I agree that to an extent, we are actually contributing to Slashdot by posting informative, interesting, humorous content. In fact, I posted a suggestion for rewarding good posters.
However, Slashdot is providing a service, namely providing an organized space for this type of communication -- in a form that is informative, interesting and humorous. In many ways, this is more valuable to me than the opinion of one individual, filtered by the opinions of a couple of editors.
The folks at Slashdot deserve to profit from their service. Banner ads are no longer viable. I'll wager ads don't defray the cost of bandwidth -- which probably runs tens of thousands of dollars per month.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
[METOO]I second that idea[/METOO]
(posted at +1 in parody of all the crap which gets posted with the bonus.)
Besides with the karma system having been around for so long, getting a 'trusted user' bonus doesn't mean that much any more.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
How is paying for the internet any different than paying for cable TV? You have to pay the cable company (ISP) to get basic service, and extra to see the premium channels which have no advertising. Sure, there are all those other channels, but they cut into movies at awkward times to show commercials. Only thing is, advertising on the net simply doesn't work. Keeping a site like slashdot up has got to be expensive (I'd estimate $20,000 a month in bandwidth alone) Plus the guys who work on slashdot have to be paid as well, it's not like they're moneygrubbing fools, but this is their job, they have to put food on the table somehow. It takes a lot more than a snazzy design to keep a successful site up nowadays. It takes real money.
First, thanks for the notification of new features.
Second, thanks for the tips on how to disable them. 8^)
Third, "Slashdot continues to grow: our traffic has increased by like 10% in the last few months, and simply selling the banner ads you see on top of each page isn't going to be enough to keep us afloat if we keep growing."
Doesn't the fact that increased traffic causes you to lose money faster tell you something?
Maybe your objective shouldn't be to keep growing. Maybe it should be to have a quality website. Remember back when you were in college and you wanted a cool site? You had one. Now you've got a semi-clueful corporate site--that's still rare, but nearly as fun as before.
And don't give me a bunch of guff about "who's going to pay for it". If you have no money, you run a smaller site. The quality is still the same.
324006
I believe I was anticipating the *fact* that slashdot readers are exactly the ones (myself included) that *will not* simply put up with an irritating imposition on their web browsing. I assume Taco knows this, which makes me think that the subscription fees will be "higher, rather than lower" than those at ars technica.
You are apparently also forgetting the *fact* that Slashdot readers are the exactly ones that are more prone to simply block the ads if the cost is too high. Taco knows the reader base, and isn't dumb enough to try to gouge us for something we can easily do ourselves. I for one am all for paying if the price is within reason. And I'm willing to bet that others feel the same.
Give the guy a chance before you jump all over him. This site takes a lot of work and money. You can't expect anyone to pay it out of pocket...
-J
while i'd probably subscribe if slashdot were to move to a subscription plan, you'd probably get more money out of me if you put a tip jar in front of me... no matter how easy you make subscribing, subscriptions are always a pain.
Ironic that here in the middile of tech obsession nobody has thought about trying to get software to solve these financial issues.
The reason the Slashdot guys don't know what they'd charge for a subscription is because they don't know. They can't know. Any value that they choose is going to be based on several factors over which they have no control:
1. The number of people who will actually subscribe
2. The number of people who will leave
3. The number of people who will continue reading slashdot with ads
4. The number of people who will continue reading slashdot with ad blockers
5. Price of bandwidth and hosting
6. Banner ad cpm value
In addition to that, there are factors over which they have limited control:
6. Amount of bandwidth used
Put that all together and in the human world you have what is called a hunch, or a guess, or any other term which indicates that you really have no idea and everything could go to shit inside of 5 minutes.
The natural human solution to this is to look at near-worst-case scenarios and attempt to budget for that happening. The best people at this are in the insurance industry. These are called Damn Good Guesses, but they're still guesses.
The major problem with the future is that the further into the future you look, the less accurate your guess is likely to be. Guessing banner ad prices 20 seconds from now, armed with current prices, isn't a big risk, and you're not likely to be off by much even if you get it wrong. Guessing 2 years from now is near impossible.
So what we need is a way of taking all the unknown variables and guessing rapidly, in short increments, using good solid math principles, in order to determine the value of those variables we do control (cost of subscription, bandwidth to release).
In essence, a floating, self-insuring market run by a well written software agent that would take account of the various costs, the insurance probabilities involved in failed predictions, and how well it can limit the release of bandwidth, and set subscription prices based on that.
Effective tools placed in the hands of users would then let them take advantage of this by limiting the value range within which they are willing to subscribe, and see transparently the decisions being made by the software and the basis for these.
Essentially creating a resubscription process in which users automatically resubscribe every day or maybe even hour or less, and in which the code is open and its behaviour displayed for those who wish to look, it can act in the best interests of both the site, the owners and the users, keeping prices at their lowest practical point while still making a set amount of money for the owners, covering the bandwidth costs and insuring the site against price shocks in the future.
There is the technical expertise around to achieve something like this, and I think Slashdot is a perfect testing ground for this kind of software. The combination of a couple of hot-shot financial guys and a bunch of good programmers could provide software that could keep any number of valuable internet sites afloat in a world so volatile that any number of valuable sites are falling down due to bad guesses on the part of their management.
You can't win a fight.
That said, I'd like to throw in another value added suggestion: a usenet feed of slashdot, so you can sort it, slice and dice it with whatever client or script you choose. The main objection to that has been lack of ad revenue, but now the person is paying, so why not? It might even cut down on bandwidth costs.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
But I'd be willing to pay more if I could pay one bill (as much as maybe $50/year) if that gave me a list of 5-10 different sites with no ads.
The last-best hope for content sites (in my opinion) is to band together and sell "all you can eat" group subscriptions. One payment, lotsa sites for one year. Hey, you want the Geek Package for $50 or the Porn Package for $200?
Personally I wouldn't go for micropayments. Too much thought involved to decide if I want to click a link. Give me one reasonable yearly rate, just like a print magazine.
As for the one comment I read about not wanting to pay for community sites, just remember the golden age of BBSs. People DID pay for community content, BUT very few people got rich! It was definitely something they did because they loved it.
To me the big lie of the dot-com era was that anyone who could sling some HTML/Javascript/Perl could expect to get rich, rich, rich. Fine. That is simply not true. A FEW people with really good business ideas will get rich, but that doesn't mean that lots of people can't earn some money. Not bloody much, mind you, but some. Sure the readership of /. would plummet if they required a subscription, but they might still make more than they can make from ads in the current economy...
One last comment. For all those Human Torches out there in /. land who cried "Flame On!" at the merest suggestion of subscription fees, do try to keep in mind that no matter how much Taco and co. love running the site, at the end of the day they have to eat.
Simple math: 0 revenue - x expenses = 0 /.
Should Slashdot be profitting off our article submissions, and our comments? That's why I read the site, not because of the editors.
Well then don't pay them and then the site will eventually go away and you'll be happy then, right? Can you possibly imagine the cost (in both time and effort) in running a site of this size? I am sure the ISP bill is in the 5 digit range every month. So you don't want to pay them because you only like the comments. Isn't that like cutting off your nose to spite your face?
If you don't like them then just send your check directly to Exodus. Really, your comment shows an immense lack of understanding for the Slashdot editors. While I will be among the first to concede that Slashdot has numerous problems, the manner in which you belittle the efforts of the staff sickens me. I can only hope at some point in the future someone calmly and rationally explains to you how something you've worked very hard on is absolutely worthless and tells you that you don't deserve any compensation for it, in fact, you should be paying them for subjecting you to it.
Let us know that we're being charged this because of need, and not because of the avarice of a few businessmen over at VA.
First of all, public corporations are legally obligated to do what is in the best interest of the corporation. So this is a ridiculous claim. Secondly, what do you want them to do? Take pictures of themselves starving? Measure their waistlines day by day so you can see just how much weight they're losing? Or for a less dramatic example, do you want the site to only be up 12 hours a day since they can only afford to pay 50% of their ISP bills?
Tell me honestly: was your post intended to be a troll, or are you just stupid?
rooooar
Me too. But that was a much smaller Slashdot. Back then there were what? 100 posts a day on a big day? Rob Malda wrote something almost every day, not just once in a while. It was a little club on an Internet that wasn't yet completely commercial.
:)
Heck, KingKurly and I were listening to WHFS (Baltimore/DC radio station) back then, before Jake Einstein sold it and the new corporate owners canned his son, Damien Einstein, because Damien stuttered and they didn't like that even though he was/is one of the greatest alternarock and freeform "I make my own playlist" DJs ever.
I'll be 49 this October 30, and I'm nostaligic about a lot of things, including an Internet where no one really worried too much about making money.
On the other hand, I was listening to the local NPR station this morning and suddenly, there was a familiar voice -- sounded just like Rob Malda -- talking some sort of shit about using giant Lego robots to invade Afghanistan, and I cracked up. The idea of Rob on a national radio show was sort of funny in itself, and having him being taken seriously by an NPR commentator with a smooth voice was even funnier, -2 all the way, you might say.
So things change, in some ways for the better, in other ways not. Yeah, some of us long for the "good old days" of Slashdot or even of Chips 'n Dips, and in some ways I was happier then, too, but in other ways not.
At least we're trying to hold the line on Slashdot ads as best we can in today's overhyped world, and still trying to get the most interesting people we can to interview (I just emailed RIAA Pres Hilary Rosen yet again -- some Slashdot interviews take a *lot* of time & persistence to arrange, you know) and all that. More story submissions, more users, more comments all the time. I suppose that's success. But it's an ever-increasing workload, too.
I think I will stop spouting and go to bed now. It's almost 11:30 p.m. and I've been up and working since 6 a.m. and I'm tired.
- Robin
Yea right.
:)
:/
Ads? Damn annoying, but they have their place, if used within reason. I trust the folks running the show here have a good sense of reason. Right?
Subscription? Also annoying, but to a smaller degree. Provided there is *NEVER* anything 'blocked' to non-subscribers, and that the fees are reasonable, then again I do not see a problem.
As for the OSDN bar, it's ugly, but it's small and not too intrusive at all. So I'm planning on leaving it alone.
As an aside, I tried a smaller subject and got a "Lameness filter encountered." message. My subject was greater then three characters, which is what that filter should be.
Pull a napkin out of the holder and write down some numbers. Let's say the servers and bandwidth are $10K a month. Add four employees at $72K/year including benefits and overhead for another $24K. That's $34K of expenses each month. Revenue? Banners are going for about $2 CPM net--if you're lucky--after commissions and fees. Assuming you can sell 16 MILLION page views you can break even for the month.
The OSDN media kit says Slashdot gets 30MM views, so no there's no problem right? Just sell all your ad inventory and you can CLEAR $30K each month after expenses. Bzzt, wrong. The Internet is swimming in ad inventory, you'll have a hard time selling that many banners at a good price. It's a buyer's market, so you either overdeliver to whatever advertisers you can find to please them or "remainder" your ads to a low-cost ad network. Ad networks like Tribal Fusion are offering sites sub-$1 CPMs, and sites are taking it because there's no better offer.
Advertisers are demanding the big obnoxious billboard ads or popups and they're getting it because sites are desperate for money. You can get a net $10 to $20 CPM on some of them! These new ad formats are all that seem to be selling lately. You either get with the program or do without ad revenue.
Some people are talking about how things will get better once the Internet ad market recovers. What makes them think the current prices are too low? Internet page views continue to increase even if the rate is slowing, so we're faced with more ad inventory instead of less. And how can an advertiser justify the price? If I'm selling a gizmo for $20 and buy banner ads on this site, I can expect best case maybe 0.1% click-throughs or one click for every 1000 impressions. If I pay a $4 gross CPM for the ads then it costs me $4 per click-through. Even if one of every 10 people who click through buy something--unusually high in my experience--it costs $40 to get one person to buy a $20 product. I need something more like a $1 CPM for this deal to make any financial sense.
If you don't like my numbers make up your own, but the bottom line is that nothing short of a bug in Microsoft Excel is going make Slashdot look wildly profitable.
I speak from experience here. The site I work on has been through all the money making schemes in the last 18 months--affiliate programs, Paypal/Amazon donation boxes, banner ads, big Cnet-style ads--and none of them work. We're not even covering our very meager expenses.
Next stop, subscriptions?
Bad, bad, bad idea. Lots of people post stuf AC because they KNOW their identity won't be revealed - about their employers, or Scientology, or other such. Without AC this won't happen. I'll gladly take 100 goatsex posts for the few good posts that come from ACs.
And yes, I routinely post AC. It's because I don't want it on my users.pl page. Sometimes it's a flame, sometimes it's a joke, sometimes it's on a hidden sid I don't want to show off, but whatever: I think the ability to do this is one of the things that makes /. great, and they should definitely not kill it.
And when I get bored, I read at -1. It's funnier than you think sometimes.
sulli
RTFJ.
I find it extremely ironic that the "I want everything for free" crowd seems willing to pay for Slashdot.
because the internet is a cooperative network. For instance, say a site wants to do business on the web. They want you to visit, but they don't pay for the cables or the routers or for your hardware or connectivity costs. They pay for their own bandwidth and you pay for your bandwidth to visit them. Both sides are already paying money to be able to visit the site. So there's no clear line between between who pays for whose real cost.
Same with viewing a site. Your user agent may or may not display (using your cpu cycles/monitor,etc.) exactly what the publisher wants you to see. It all relies on cooperation. Now this is very different from other business models, and so people get upset when a site changes its formats. Why? because they are not involved. They don't know what is a real operating expense and what is a plan to pay for unwanted expansion. maybe they'd rather have the site load slower and charge less, or maybe they want lighting speed at a premium. We dont see any expense reports or business plans and have no control over the future of the site. It's as if a partner suddenly changed the rules of the game without consulting you. That's fine in a brick and mortar world where you take it or leave it, but on the net it doesn't work, since I can always tell my user agent to not display the crappy iframes. My hope is that there's a chance that those sites which involve viewers and give them some control over site development/business plans/ subscription rates will have an audience of cooperative visitors. Others will get their ads blocked. But the consideration has to be earned in any case, and does not follow just because the webmaster really really wants you to view the ads.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
These are very sad news to read in the morning. With very few exceptions, I have been a daily Slashdot user for a very long time, perhaps from almost the beginning. I have recommended it to lots of others. I have regarded Slashdot with a level of respect difficult to describe. I have participated as editor in one of the many slashdot-inspired fora.
Today I wake up and become afraid that soon the cluetrain may not stop here any more.
Yes, I am aware that getting advertisers is not as easy as it once was. Yes, I am aware that bandwidth is far from free. Could other sources of expense here be replaced by voluntary work? Are we talking about supporting Slashdot survival expenses or about OSDN profit levels? Perhaps OSDN is unable to consider those questions separately. Perhaps Slashdot participants and readers can.
In spite of all the differences between participants here, there seems to be something very strong which we can call a "Slashdot community". It seems to me something too precious to scatter, and I suggest a lot of reflexion before Slashdot becomes simply another site adopting obnoxious ephemeral fashionable advertising tactics like huge ad images.
Maybe I am wrong, but my view is that those ads can only be good from the greedy point of view of those interested in short term profit but with no respect for the future of the places where those ads are shown. For those simply buying and selling with no regard for content and communities, huge WWW ads may be the winning strategy of the day. For those with a genuine interest in ensuring the future of a site and its community, I believe the same ad strategy can be suicidal.
Having started to use Mozilla, I now have the habit of disabling banner ad viewing. But I never considered doing that for Slashdot. In fact, contrary to my practice on other sites (where I automatically ignored the ads even before blocking them), I have even followed your banner ads a lot of times; they worked as specialized ads on a specialized magazine. But do not expect this atitude to remain the same if Slashdot starts using the kind of intrusive ad specimens we have seen at online trade rags. I will certainly try to block them.
Considering that we are talking about Slashdot, maybe the above (viewing ads now, blocking them later if they become huge) is a common attitude among many of your readers. Yes, perhaps many others do not know how to block ads with proxies or don't have a browser which makes that easier. But can Slashdot afford to alienate those with the minimal "level of technical expertise" needed to block ads?
Of course I prefer to pay directly for something I consider important than seeing it flooded with ads and (with a false impression of low or zero price) paying through advertisers.But would annoying ads really be the motivating factor for doing this? Maybe yes, maybe no. There is always the risk that what is perceived as the annoying entity is Slashdot itself, not the ads by themselves. And then Slashdot expenses with bandwidth may become lower for a sad reason: less participants. "Participants", not only "readers"; contrary to what a TV ad a few years ago menaced, here in slashdot with some kinds of advertising there will be "a lot less news". And people to read them.
There is something I once thought of for Slashdot-like fora which could be much more interesting than huge banners, but I do not have a clue about its commercial feasibility: there could be special articles inserted among the normal ones, but clearly marked as beeing payed by advertisers. In these articles a company would say whetever it wanted about its products; they could just contain mindless marketroid speech or (much more appealing to Slashdot participants) interesting technical info about the stuff they are trying to sell. Ideally, one would also be able to comment on these articles as for any others.
At its best, it would not be advertising-as-usual. It would involve more than an art department and some content-free sentences. But is advertising-as-usual the best way to reach this audience?
I also hope Slashdot will be here another four years, and many more. I just hope that the expensive reality associated with making this site happen will not become less expensive because of less readers. And, even more important, because of less participants.
Don't banner ads already have a moderation system? Its called "click throughs."
Now, if you throw in some personalization, then you might have something.
Slashdot is one of the few web sites I'd actually pay to read. Even if it still had (unobtrusive) ads after pay. Though I'd prefer that there were none if I pay. (Before you have a stroke and capitalize all your letters flaming: you'll note that you pay for Rolling Stone, and you still get ads. You pay for cable TV and you STILL get ads.)
Just like NPR, these people gotta make a living. Putting on the Slashdot show costs money. It's gotta come from somewhere. So we pay for a subscription. Big deal.
A lot of people here spend a lot of energy bitching about what they get for free. They bitch about Linux, They bitch about BSD. They bitch about Slashdot. Frankly, I'm sick of hearing it. I'm grateful for Linux, and being able to get an operating system for free. And I'm grateful for getting as much content (and don't forget slashcode!) and opinion as we get from Slashdot for free.
So basically, when it comes time to pay, I'll pony it up and hope Taco/Hemos/Cowboy Neal/etc. can take a nice vacation.
And if the $20.00 a year is so distasteful to you, you can always read this ad-free page.
Slashdot continues to grow: our traffic has increased by like 10% in the last few months
Did you take the whole WTC disaster (11/9, remember?) into account? I'm betting every news-site has seen this increase (or more!).
Hell, I don't even see it because it's up there in banner ad space, which is completely ignored when scanning the page for content. Like the banner ads themselves, I think it will prove to be essentially useless even if people don't turn it off.
I take it then that when you're watching the telly, and the adverts come on, instead of going to make a cup of tea or for a piss, you sit there staring at them intently?
IMO, the new ads will be no problem as long as:
/. is the probably the only site where I regularly take notice of and even respond to ads.
- the ads remain relevant to the site like they are now. I actually click on these. I'd say
- the ads stay in one place on the screen so eventually they scroll off. I abhor the new flash ads that float around the screen, make noises, follow your cursor, etc. Ads that scroll with a page are bad enough, but when they take over my computer that's pretty damn unacceptable. For examples of what NOT to do, check out scifi.com, especially on their message boards.
As for the new bar at the top, perfectly fine! Doesn't get in the way, not too ugly, and could even be useful.
As for a subscription, I would pay, but not anything more than a few dollars a month. I would be more responsive to a place where I can donate when I have the money. As one other person mentioned, if you had a pledge drive, like NPR or PBS, I think you may find you'd have enough dough to scrap your new ad plan and even take a nice vacation.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Now what I would like is a customizable toolbar, a la the slashboxes. That way the trolls could have a link straight to goatse.cx at the top, and I could add some other OSDN and/or news sites I like to read - could be useful.
sulli
RTFJ.
Please combine the subscription offer with a t-shirt or hat. That way I can offer some small financial and moral support to slashdot.
Or maybe a coffee mug.