• Spring 2024 meetup in Calgary - tentative date Saturday, April 20/2024. Other regions are also discussing meet ups. If you want one in your area get going on organizing it! discussion
  • We are having email/registration problems again. Diagnosis is underway. New users sorry if you are having trouble getting registered. We are exploring different options to get registered. Contact the forum via another member or on facebook if you're stuck. Update -> we think it is fixed. Let us know if not.
  • Spring meet up in Ontario, April 6/2024. NEW LOCATION See Post #31 Discussion NEW LOCATION

We're Going to Try Some Banner Ads for Guest (Not Logged In) Users

Jwest7788

Joshua West
Administrator
Hey folks,

This is a heads up that we're going to be trying some banner ads on the website. (Don't panic just yet!)

Who will be impacted?
This will be limited to anyone who is not logged into an account.
--> To be clear, you do not have to be a supporting member in any form to have an ad-free experience, you simply need to log into the website. If you don't already have one, accounts are free, and we encourage all to register.
If you have ever posted on the forum, you already have an account, and by being logged into your account, you will not be impacted by this change.

What is Causing This Change?
As you may have seen, the forum admins, @Alexander, @Janger, and I, recently put out a help wanted thread, seeking a moderator(s) and seeking folks willing to participate in the planning of meetups via committee.
(Still looking for meetup committee volunteers, message @Alexander if interested).

Essentially, we're hoping to get our community back into the routine of hosting periodic meetups, becoming more active, and doing more fun stuff as groups where possible.
With almost 1,800 registered members of the forum spread across the globe, we recognize that there is a good chance that our community may need more funds than are available at this time.
As our group and meetup attendance grows, we can't really depend on crashing Tim Hortons restaurants as we did back in 2015 when we first got started, and as our aim is to have meetups across the nation, Door prizes, meetup venues, food, etc, all will demand more funds than we have available at this time.

Why Ads Instead of a Call for Donations?
Though our community has thrived on the generous support of member donations to date, however, we've always had big dreams for the community, and this is a step closer to those goals.

What Will The Impact Be?
We're getting mixed messages, but Google seems to think we'll have a few hundred dollars a month to work with in the future, depending on how many, we'll almost certainly use a good chunk on things we should have done years ago, like updating our legal status (incorporation type), getting a book keeper involved, etc.

What Else is Changing?
In response to our growth the admin team is putting in place extra systems and measures in place to ensure our community can continue to flourish into the future. This decision is far from arbitrary, and we're actually changing much more than meets the eye, "under the hood" of the organization.

Behind the scenes, control of the forum's finances is being decentralized from my own control, with @Alexander and @Janger, both now having control and oversight over forum finances,
Control over the admin@canadianhobbymetalworkers.com email has been distributed among the admins,
The increasing distance being put between CHMW and CAYK the marketing agency I spend my days at,
and the addition of both moderators and meetup committee members,
Each of these changes is moving towards a stronger foundation for the forum, to ensure we're minimizing the number of "single points of failure" for our community.

Similarly, we're trying to plan further into the future, and planning for "what if" scenarios, like, what if we need to buy a hosting server at some point, what if we need to get insurance for admins and moderators, and what if we want to seriously dive into registered charity status? etc. These larger strategic questions, when we dig into them deeply enough, all fall down with our current (donation based) system.


Thanks Folks!
 
Last edited:

Susquatch

Ultra Member
Administrator
Moderator
Premium Member
Sounds great to me Joshua.

I have a strong preference against advertizing for registered members and would even pay for the privilege of not seeing ads. Your approach seems like a great way to do that and I like your logic.

A few questions for you that may affect your direction.

Do you know what our traffic is for members vs non-members?

Do you have a feeling for what the usage level would be that would support acquiring our own server and all the additional workload that this entails? I assume you know that it's prodigious...... My advice is to continue to buy server space for as long as someone is willing to sell it to you at a reasonable price. Buying, connecting, programming, and maintaining our own server (and backup servers) is a HUGE investment.
 

Jwest7788

Joshua West
Administrator
Do you know what our traffic is for members vs non-members?
Yes. We see significantly more non-member visitors than we do member visitors (~90% unregistered)
In the month of June we saw:
26,277 site visits
432,310 pageviews, and
938,224 Hits (Individual file resources loaded)


Do you have a feeling for what the usage level would be that would support acquiring our own server and all the additional workload that this entails? I assume you know that it's prodigious...... My advice is to continue to buy server space for as long as someone is willing to sell it to you at a reasonable price. Buying, connecting, programming, and maintaining our own server (and backup servers) is a HUGE investment.
Yes, we started on our own server, then migrated hosting to my company server, (a hypervisor cluster I also manage, backups offsite and in the cloud).
We're not at a usage level where we need a new dedicated server for the forum, but I am familiar with the implications.

This trend line of our pageviews is why we're planning long term, things aren't slowing down, nor are they expected to, as this is all organic growth. (We're not advertising ourselves or anything like that.)
1657109592061.png

A server isn't a high priority at the moment, just another potential area of concern in future for which we would rather be prepared if we ever get there.
 

Susquatch

Ultra Member
Administrator
Moderator
Premium Member
Thanks @Jwest7788 . I suppose that's all good. Certainly your planning and forward thinking is commendable. Your comprehensive answer also tells me that we are in very good hands.

Two personal questions: I'm always worried about privacy. How much of our traffic is crawlers and the like vs a human? Related to that is what percentage of our traffic is from off-shore?
 

Sailor

Randy
Premium Member
Very forward thinking and progressive planning for the future of this site, thank you.
 

Jwest7788

Joshua West
Administrator
Thanks Folks! We appreciate the kind comments.

Two personal questions: I'm always worried about privacy. How much of our traffic is crawlers and the like vs a human? Related to that is what percentage of our traffic is from off-shore?
1) This is the last year or so, looking just at unique IP addresses ("Users")
1657643387120.png

2)
The second question is harder to suss out with accuracy, and telling a real user from a bot, from web analytics alone is a tricky one. I could guess, but it is probably best left as an uncertainty.


Hope this helps!
 

Hruul

Lee - metalworking novice
Same on my computer running chrome. The banner on the bottom is ok, its the window that blocks the screen till I deal with it that I find annoying.
 

YYCHM

(Craig)
Premium Member
I'm seeing all manner of ads today, as in lots. Win10 running Chrome and I'm logged in. Not liking this:(
 
Last edited:

Susquatch

Ultra Member
Administrator
Moderator
Premium Member
Thanks Folks! We appreciate the kind comments.


1) This is the last year or so, looking just at unique IP addresses ("Users")
View attachment 24908

2)
The second question is harder to suss out with accuracy, and telling a real user from a bot, from web analytics alone is a tricky one. I could guess, but it is probably best left as an uncertainty.


Hope this helps!

Thanks Joshua, my hosting service used to have tools to identify crawlers from people based on their page scanning rate per given time period so I thought it might be easy for you to do too. Not all hosting services are the same in that respect. It agree that it's too hard to do without these tools. If I recall correctly, it was based on ranking the hits per IP per hour. It became really easy to see humans vs bots.

Anyway, I guess the best way to protect ourselves is to know that it is happening and be mindful of what you post.
 

DavidR8

Scrap maker
Administrator
Moderator
Premium Member
So my ad blocker is preventing posts to some threads but not all.
This is completely new behaviour as I've been using Ad Blocker Ultimate for the last three years and only had this problem today.
 

VicHobbyGuy

Ultra Member
So my ad blocker is preventing posts to some threads but not all.
This is completely new behaviour as I've been using Ad Blocker Ultimate for the last three years and only had this problem today.
No worries...the customary next step from the 'monetize everything' movement is to block page access if you are using an Ad Blocker. I see this on some sites I used to visit. Stay tuned....
 

DavidR8

Scrap maker
Administrator
Moderator
Premium Member
No worries...the customary next step from the 'monetize everything' movement is to block page access if you are using an Ad Blocker. I see this on some sites I used to visit. Stay tuned....
So the question is why only on this thread (and ironically on my bug thread...)
 
Top