I use AdBlock on my desktop, so I don’t see them there. But Chrome for Android doesn’t have extensions, so unless I use Firefox with AdBlock on my phone and tablet just for this site, I’m doomed to scrolling (does this sound fucking familiar ???) through ads to get to content.
Plus I hope you see an irony here: You’ve added ads to your site that you don’t see, because you block them.
Honestly, the cost of domain hosting is like $5 a month at current bandwidth use, right? Couldn’t we all just send you like two bits a month and lose the ads?
The cost of full-service Discourse hosting including support, backup, anti-spam, etc. is $100 a month and will go up if and when I need more help moderating.
As shown in the screenshots above, when using Chrome on Android, I see tiny ads only at the top and bottom of topics. When viewing new posts in a previously read topic, I rarely see the ads: Discourse auto-scrolls to the first new post, and the ad at the bottom is past the action buttons, so I typically don’t scroll that far.
I’m doing this because I wanted an alternative to Chowhound and figured other people would as well. There are cheaper alternatives to hosted Discourse but they’d all take a lot more of my time. So far I have around $300 in expenses (including $101.01 for ads on chowhound.com) and $0 in revenues. I doubt the Google ad revenues will ever cover the hosting charges.
The Akismet spam filter is set to the Discourse defaults. Out of 2,656 posts to date, six were flagged as spam and confirmed as not spam. If one of those was yours, I’m sorry, but I don’t think less than 0.25% counts as “overzealous” filtering, especially given that there have been around 30,000 anonymous visits, some of which surely tried to spam the site and were blocked. (If Akismet has logs showing this stuff I haven’t found them yet.)
You plan on paying moderators? If so, please contact me; I’d be happy to moderate for pay. But in all seriousness, why wouldn’t you count on volunteer moderators? I’ve moderated on two sites and have yet to get any pay from either one (both non-profits).
It has nothing to do with email. I’m the admin so that’s one staff account. With the $100 plan, I can assign moderator privileges to at most four other users.
@robert, thanks so much for setting up this site! I haven’t had this much fun on Ciaohound in years.
BTW, I’d be more than willing to make a monetary contribution to help pay for the site if AdWords doesn’t bring in enough revenue. It wouldn’t be fair for you to shoulder all the costs. Thanks again for everything!
A good deal of the spam filtering is not logged because it’s just stuff from “the only login form that spambots get to see (without running a full browser and running JS and stuff) is 100% fake” to “haha we broke the system you have to auto-confirm email accounts” to the more advanced technique of “if it takes you less than 10 keystrokes to write your first post you’re probably copy-pasting spam”.
(Note: That second one will show up as “Needs Approval”.)
Here’s an interesting ad: an OpenTable promotion with links that take you directly to the reservation page for particular restaurants that are clearly targeted geographically and might be based on my own personal interests, so far as they can guess them.
