Advertising on FPN to start up again

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Dearest Members and Visitors of the Fountain Pen Nuthouse,

 

Our advertising add-on is ready to go, so during the week ahead, advertising will start running again!

 

Why is this, you may ask?

Advertising has been our main source for funding our out-of-pocket and running costs for this forum, and this is not likely going to change anytime soon.

It means we can make this site available for free to all members and visitors. As before, we will not overdo things, in case you are worried.

 

Are there any differences with regards to the old implementation?

Yes, there are.

We had an add-on built for us, with a project that started over 2 1/2 years ago, interrupted a few times by the fact that the new forum software wasn't ready yet for our site. The new add-on was based on the old one we used, but which no longer works with the new software. We also made use of this opportunity to add a few enhancements.

The main enhancements are:

1. The new add-on controls all aspects of advertising, which means it is no longer necessary to have a separate "No Ads" donation option. It wil work with any support option and up, IOW, it will work whether you are a Supporter or Premium account holder.
2. There is no need anymore to change Themes/Skins to a "No Ads" version to opt out of seeing ads. Again, this was caused by the fact that ads were created with the aid of three different add-ons in the past, that did not work very well together. That is all in the past however, as we now have a "Disable Adverts" option in your profile, and a satellite one next to the Theme chooser option at the bottom of the page (see below). Of course, you will only have this option available if you are a Supporter or Premium Account holder.

 

Profile option to disable adverts:

 

Disable adverts at the bottom of the page:

 

 

I was using an ad blocker, so does anything change for me?

Yes, there will be changes.

We are still building up our adverts currently. However, once that is at least partly done, possibly today even, we will switch on our ad blocker checker, asking you to disable your ad blocker for our site. That will be all we will do right now.

However, we will with time change this to a mandatory option, because it is the only way to achieve the funding we need to keep FPN running. This will mean that you won't be able to access most of our content here, unless you switch off your ad blocker specifically for FPN.

The reason we have to do this is because our advertising income has been dwindling, as has our donations income. In the past, advertising accounted for about 2/3, and donations for about 1/3 of the funding we need to keep FPN running, and both have come to a point, to a large degree by ad blockers, that we will have to take some measures to get around these problems.

 

Can't you do something else for funding?

We have, in the past, tried many different things when it comes to funding, and a lof of these felt great to do. However, all of those appeared to be very costly, and required volunteers to do a lot of work, beyond everything they already did for the site, like moderating, admin, bookkeeping, etc.

Considering we were making a loss on some of the projects we did, and like no more than 1% or 2 % profit going to FPN funding on most others, we would not start up any of those projects again, like inks, pens and/or paper, unless we are sure we can afford to. IOW, if there is enough funding support for FPN to stay in the air, and we can find the right people to help out without overtaxing them into a burn-out (as has happened in the past too), we will start doing them again.

 

We are also looking at other ways of funding at the moment, and those ideas will become clear and/or we will make announcements once everything here is in order. We are still working on getting everything to work as before after the completion of the database fix, migration, conversion and upgrade, and this is likely to take about another 3 to 3 1/2 months. This particular project was part of this process, actually.

 

If you have any further questions, please do ask. We may set up a topic on the subject in the Community Feedback forum, depending on the questions we may receive.

 

Thank you very much in advance!

 

Warm regards,

on behalf of The FPN Moderator and Admin Team,

Wim

 

P.S.: If you'd like to react to this topic, of have any questions, please post these here:

 

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Dearest Members and Visitors of the Fountain Pen Nuthouse,

 

Our advertising add-on is on-line, so as of today, our advertising trial will start running.

 

Note to Supporters and Premium Account Holders:

You mauy switch off advertising as indicated in the post above, as you will have access to the Disable Adverts option.

 

We'll see how it all works out, small adjustments may stil lbe needed.

 

Warm regards,

on behalf of The FPN Moderator and Admin Team,

Wim

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Dearest Members and Visitors of the Fountain Pen Nuthouse,

 

We have now enabled everything required for GDPR and CCPA, and then some.

No need to worry:

We wanted to be as transparant about this as possible, which means we have a very fine grained interface which allows you to switch off anything you do not like or do not agree with.

In addition, you can always go back to your choices if you so like, by means of the sticky "Privacy" button at the top left of the browser window. See here:

 

In fact we are showing everything that many web sites do without telling you, and you have the option to switch off virtually everything as well. If you do not want to be tracked, you may indicate that. If you do not want adverts to follow you by means of geolocation, you can switch it off. You can switch of individual advertising agencies, etc. etc.

 

If you do not want to see any adverts at all, that is also a possibility: become a Supporter, or a Premium Account Holder, and you will have the option to Disable Adverts completely, see the starter post above.

 

Note to Supporters and Premium Account Holders:

You may switch off advertising as indicated in the starter post above, as you will have access to the Disable Adverts option already.

 

Warm regards,

on behalf of The FPN Moderator and Admin Team,

Wim

 

P.S.: for any questions or comments regarding this subject, please check the relevant topic(s) in the Community Feedback forum.

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Dearest Members and Visitors of the Fountain Pen Nuthouse,

 

We have received a few more adverts, and have made those active.

New adverts:

The number of adverts on FPN has now gone from 1 to 5, still in testing, to see if this is going to help us fund the site, without having a large impact on usability

 

If you do not want to see any adverts at all, that is also a possibility: become a Supporter, or a Premium Account Holder, and you will have the option to Disable Adverts completely, see the starter post above.

 

Note to Supporters and Premium Account Holders:

If you belong to our select group of FPN Supporters or Premium Account Holders, you will eb able to switch off advertising as indicated in the starter post above, as you will have access to the Disable Adverts option.

 

Warm regards,

on behalf of The FPN Moderator and Admin Team,

Wim