Praying for more ad-free options

[dustys]

There's no recourse in an instance where you just have a very eager member who f5s nonstop right? They aren't spamming. Just refreshing nonstop. Ideally I'd want to have more options and disable ad-free from people who browse this way. This person used 1000 views in an hour.

[Retread]

Aug 31, 2019 5:37:55 GMT -8 dustys said:

There's no recourse in an instance where you just have a very eager member who f5s nonstop right? They aren't spamming. Just refreshing nonstop. Ideally I'd want to have more options and disable ad-free from people who browse this way. This person used 1000 views in an hour.

Hi dustys

To the best of my knowledge, the only choices for ad-free are:

• (logged-in) members-only, or
• everyone, including guests.

Thus it wouldn't be possible to exclude by group, and put a member in the excluded group.

I don't know if such a thing would be feasible or if ProBoards would consider making it available, but it sounds like a reasonable Feature Request. You'll probably get an answer from one of the ProBoards Admins, when they return from the holiday weekend on Tuesday.

[bigballofyarn]

I'm actually considering canceling my ad-free plan because of this. It's been set to members only for years, but I do have a handful of members who browse this way. They want to constantly see if there's a new post or a new reply to something they said. I've gotten into the annoying habit of disabling and re-enabling ad-free every time I'm working on the forum and generating a lot of clicks and/or when these "offenders" are around. However, it's not a good solution.

I pay for the 50,000 package. The Forum Analytics page is showing me a current usage of over 89,000 views for August. I've used 49,113 ad-free views. I'm wasting a lot of time trying to prevent overuse by certain members. I don't know whether or not I can code something that affects who has access to ad-free viewing.  I don't know whether or not I can code something that affects who has access to ad-free viewing. If it's allowed under the laws of the ToS, my boyfriend and I will probably exercise our coding abilities and see what happens.

Right now, there are no options to resolve this problem. I don't consider switching to the 100,000 plan a resolution.

Edit:

After discussing things with my boyfriend, we don't see any way for this to be possible. Proboards would have to make this a feature.

[Scott]

I will mark this as a feature request.

[moonbeam]

Aug 31, 2019 5:37:55 GMT -8 dustys said:

There's no recourse in an instance where you just have a very eager member who f5s nonstop right? They aren't spamming. Just refreshing nonstop. Ideally I'd want to have more options and disable ad-free from people who browse this way. This person used 1000 views in an hour.

Have you tried talking to the member about it and letting them know that they are using up a lot of your ad free? Maybe they really don't realize the cost involved with this.

[dustys]

Yes. Tried talking to him but it's just what he does. It's how he browses all forums. He's young and doesn't understand per say. He's about half my age. So it is what it is unfortunately.

[theledge]

Have you told him you will disable his membership, if he doesn't toe the line? Try a week, then a month if he continues.

[Derek‽]

Aug 31, 2019 6:05:43 GMT -8 bigballofyarn said:

I don't know whether or not I can code something that affects who has access to ad-free viewing. If it's allowed under the laws of the ToS, my boyfriend and I will probably exercise our coding abilities and see what happens.

That isn’t possible. When a forum is ad-free, it isn’t a case of the ad being hidden or anything of the sort—the ad code simply isn’t present. There is no ad; it doesn’t exist at all. As such, there’s no coding you could ever fashion to make the ad appear for some members and not others. This would require a built-in feature from PB.

At best, you could get your own ad publishing account (and custom domain, of course) and make those ads only appear for known offenders, but the majority of ads would be CPC (meaning you only get paid when an ad is clicked on) and thus you almost certainly wouldn’t come close to recovering the costs of their ad-free usage.

A very simple code could be created to address the issue of F5 spammers and warn them off of their behavior, though. Log the last X page loads to SessionStorage or LocalStorage, and hide the page content if the average time between each load is within a certain threshold (say, less than a minute), replacing the normal content with a message asking them to modify their behavior, restoring the original content after a timed delay. It wouldn’t prevent them from rapidly refreshing the page and eating through views, but it would dissuade them from doing so.

[moonbeam]

Aug 31, 2019 9:15:10 GMT -8 dustys said:

Yes. Tried talking to him but it's just what he does. It's how he browses all forums. He's young and doesn't understand per say. He's about half my age. So it is what it is unfortunately.

Being young is no excuse. It's your forum and you that's paying for the ad free. So, it's up to you to tell him he needs to behave responsibly, and if he can't, then there'll be a penalty. What that would be is up to you, but I'd also start with a short suspension, and increase it if he just doesn't get it.

Or, you could always discontinue ad free. <shrug>

[dustys]

Aug 31, 2019 6:05:43 GMT -8 bigballofyarn said:

I don't see any way for this to be possible. If it were possible, and allowed under the laws of the ToS, my boyfriend and I would probably try something.

Right now, there are no options to resolve this problem. I don't consider switching to the 100,000 plan a resolution.

Thanks! I know you'd help if it were

Aug 31, 2019 11:41:02 GMT -8 theledge said:

Have you told him you will disable his membership, if he doesn't toe the line? Try a week, then a month if he continues.

Sort of. He doesn't understand what he's doing or why it's wrong to keep checking. Thanks for the support!

Aug 31, 2019 14:51:37 GMT -8 moonbeam said:

Aug 31, 2019 9:15:10 GMT -8 dustys said:

Yes. Tried talking to him but it's just what he does. It's how he browses all forums. He's young and doesn't understand per say. He's about half my age. So it is what it is unfortunately.

Being young is no excuse. It's your forum and you that's paying for the ad free. So, it's up to you to tell him he needs to behave responsibly, and if he can't, then there'll be a penalty. What that would be is up to you, but I'd also start with a short suspension, and increase it if he just doesn't get it.

Or, you could always discontinue ad free. <shrug>

It's a toughy. I'll figure it out with the staff. Thanks for the support!

[bigballofyarn]

Derek‽,

Yeah, after speaking to my boyfriend, we pretty quickly concluded that we had no way of doing this. Proboards would have to make it a feature.

[Michael]

I'll leave the feature request label on but this seems like a lot of work for a very narrow use case.

[marathonman]

Sorry for the intrusion I do not understand why PB cannot just go to a flat rate per month instead of this crazy per view scheme. i am new to Pb and do not have adds as of yet which i detest like You Tube riddled adds. it is horrible that advertisers get people to sell there sole to the devil for a lousy buck.
i understand Pb has operating costs that need to be met but at what expense to the customers. the added pressure of per view costs that i have witnessed and read here out weigh the added expense of add free. 

so my point is why can't Proboard go to a flat rate instead of per view.?

Marathonman  figueramarathonman.boards.net

[Michael]

Sept 3, 2019 12:43:15 GMT -8 marathonman said:

Sorry for the intrusion I do not understand why PB cannot just go to a flat rate per month instead of this crazy per view scheme. i am new to Pb and do not have adds as of yet which i detest like You Tube riddled adds. it is horrible that advertisers get people to sell there sole to the devil for a lousy buck.
i understand Pb has operating costs that need to be met but at what expense to the customers. the added pressure of per view costs that i have witnessed and read here out weigh the added expense of add free. 

so my point is why can't Proboard go to a flat rate instead of per view.?

Marathonman  figueramarathonman.boards.net

Simply put, because our costs are pretty much per view. Should we peg the cost of it to the biggest forum? The flat rate would be 500+ dollars a month and nobody would purchase it. Should we peg it to the lowest cost forum? The flat rate would be too low and we wouldn't be able to afford to offer you a free forum as we would no longer exist as a business. 

If we did the whole thing based on an average you would see the cost of ad free more than quadrupled its current rate by my best guess.

Some companies who offer flat rate ad-free often have other limits with other associated costs. We don't want to limit boards, users, staff members, password protected boards and more. We could consider a flat rate more readily if there was interest in paying a flat rate for what (right now) are standard unlimited features.

We haven't changed the price of ad free since the launch of v5 (2013 I think?) and it is currently underpriced based on cost.

All of this to basically say we too would like to offer more ad-free options (and we plan to). We've tossed around virtually every idea you can think of and have some ideas but they'll have to wait until after the launch of v6.

[Michael]

I would also like to add that ProBoards+ is unlimited personal ad-free at a $2.99/month which is almost exactly what you're asking for but on a per-user level.