Montana Matt wrote:the majority of the most recent changes were simply to make the ad placements more prominent where they pay better

Does "more prominent" mean in the first few chapters and at the very bottom of the page? If so, how about reordering chapters so that the Overview (perhaps renamed "The Summit') is the last/second/third last instead of #1 or 2 or 3? Like here

In addition to what Scott was showing, I noticed yesterday a disconcerted jumpiness when scrolling down the page, which was likely due to the new banner ads stretching across the page.

As I was reading a paragraph I needed to scroll down to bring more text onto the monitor from below the screen, but the page jumped (rushed) upward or something, causing me to lose my place in the paragraph. It was definitely not smooth reading.

Scott wrote:Anyway, the ads are getting way worse. It took me 7 scroll downs to even screen shot all the ads on the latest What's New page and it's not a very big page.

That may be the case with certain pages. The ads are now controlled on a page-by-page basis, as I understand it. The people who are managing the ads said that they are trying to minimize ads on most pages while letting the more highly-trafficked pages pay for the rest of the site. So if you hit a page that pays well on ad space (for whatever reason), the ads might be more prominent and annoying on that page. But hopefully this won't be the case with all or most pages.

yatsek wrote:Does "more prominent" mean in the first few chapters and at the very bottom of the page?

I don't know where they locate the ads. The move them around and resize them based on which locations and sizes pay the best.

Klenke wrote:In addition to what Scott was showing, I noticed yesterday a disconcerted jumpiness when scrolling down the page, which was likely due to the new banner ads stretching across the page.

That's annoying. I haven't noticed that but I have noticed ads sometimes breaking the layout of pages, depending on how they render.

Sorry I missed your post on my initial response, ZeeJay.

ZeeJay wrote:How much storage is taken up by images vs the entire rest of SP?

The images take up the vast majority of space. The database is on the order of 4GB, I think? The images are over 1TB (1000GB).

ZeeJay wrote:What do people think about allowing page owners to delete pictures deemed uninteresting and uninformative if they are not otherwise attached, especially of those who haven't logged onto SP in years?

I'm not sure that eliminating or minimizing the number of photos at this point will have much of an impact on the bottom line. Every little bit would help, but the majority of the cost is in bandwidth to serve those photos requested by end users from the cloud to the client requesting. That bandwidth usage wouldn't go down all that much if we got rid of photos no one is looking at. It would decrease our storage fees, which would be nice, but the storage is much less expensive than the bandwidth to serve images.

Mountain project hosts thousands of photos as well and they have minimal ads without much affect on page viewing. Maybe see how they do it. I just looked at a few pages today both on laptop and my phone... It was utterly rediculous how they looked. Couldn't even read them due to the jumpieness klenke mentions.

Matt Lemke wrote:Mountain project hosts thousands of photos as well and they have minimal ads without much affect on page viewing. Maybe see how they do it.

Mountain Project actually has no ads on their site. MP was purchased by REI a few years ago. REI fully supports the site financially now, along with paying their team members' salaries, so no ads run on the site other than some REI branding. REI makes their money back (in theory - no idea if they actually do) on the users of the site purchasing gear from REI.

If someone can work out a deal for REI to purchase SummitPost, I'm all for it!

If someone can work out a deal for REI to purchase SummitPost, I'm all for it!

We should seriously look into doing that.

Meanwhile....the ad on the left keeps covering content. Matt you said you'd let the people who run the ads know about the encroachment over page content (even after closing the ad).

And who exactly are these people? Are you saying you have no control over the positioning of ads on a page at least with respect to "keep out zones" where content is located?

Klenke wrote:Matt you said you'd let the people who run the ads know about the encroachment over page content (even after closing the ad).

Yes, they know. And I've let our design guy know to make the sidebar a little wider (minimum of 300px so that it doesn't cover the main content) and I believe he's working on it. Changing the width of that sidebar has a cascading effect on the rest of the columns on the page, so that has to be taken into consideration and I believe that's why he hasn't just made the change.

Klenke wrote:Are you saying you have no control over the positioning of ads on a page at least with respect to "keep out zones" where content is located?

That's correct. Google Adsense and the other ad networks we work with randomly position the ads (and make them different sizes) and see which place and size has the best return. I have no control over where most of the ads appear on the page at this point.

So you're saying the center column for table data (like my 1000-ft prominence list) will now get narrower? ... after I worked for hours coding that table to be as compact as possible.

Also, do these/would these folks placing ads really care if they were covering content? What recourse do you have when they don't comply with your requests to fix issues of this kind?

This isn't a big complaint, but it is sort of annoying that ads appear in the middle of photo captions.

The idea about REI buying out SummitPost is intriguing. Having a major gear supplier such as REI, Sierra Trading Post, Mountain Gear, Campmor or others as sponsor-owners of the site would certainly save SP from the almost-certain demise the ads from hell will certainly bring.

Besides a sponsor-owner, the only other solution I can think of is to require an annual membership fee, say $10 per member, to offset the operational costs of SP. While SP lists over 41,000 members, a more serious look at that number shows a great many inactive members – people who have not signed on in years. While $10 annually should not be a financial hardship for almost anyone, it should help weed out those who are not serious about contributing to development of content in SP. I doubt if the “member” selling fake ID’s a few days ago would have done that if he had to pay to be a member. If SP had even 5,000 members who paid $10 each every year, that $50,000 should cover the figures Matt has mentioned. An annual fee would also help create an accurate list of active members.

Whatever solution can be found will probably eventually require that the content of SP be evaluated for at least some basic levels of quality. A serious sponsor will probably have the same concerns that serious SP members have about the growing accumulation of incomplete pages (you know, those pages with one-liner sections plus empty sections that say “add text here” – and often with few or no photos on the page). A college computer instructor told me a few years ago that good content is more important than style for the survival of a website.

If we think SP has a huge database now, what will another 10 years of uploading photos and more pages do to that? What will it add to the costs? It may be a painful thing to even think about, but at some point all the stuff that does not really help the purpose of SP may have to be eliminated. Certainly, every new submission deserves a period of time for members to vote on. But if SP members do not deem the submissions worth a good vote, then the page should be sent back to the owner for improvement or else deleted. Lots of photos tend to eat up lots of drive space (as I have found on my hard drive). As much as anyone would hate to do so, it will probably become necessary at some point to eliminate all low-score photos. SP quality and survival are at stake here.

Here’s hoping good solutions can be found and implemented for the long-term viability of SP.

The idea about REI buying out SummitPost is intriguing. Having a major gear supplier such as REI, Sierra Trading Post, Mountain Gear, Campmor or others as sponsor-owners of the site would certainly save SP from the almost-certain demise the ads from hell will certainly bring.

Backcountry.com too.

If someone can work out a deal for REI to purchase SummitPost, I'm all for it!

What kind of deal? A straight handover just to maintain the site? I can try contacting them. I used to sell products to REI.

ZeeJay wrote:I'm not sure that eliminating or minimizing the number of photos at this point will have much of an impact on the bottom line. Every little bit would help, but the majority of the cost is in bandwidth to serve those photos requested by end users from the cloud to the client requesting. That bandwidth usage wouldn't go down all that much if we got rid of photos no one is looking at. It would decrease our storage fees, which would be nice, but the storage is much less expensive than the bandwidth to serve images.

We could significantly reduce bandwidth usage on pages if the images section loaded a small image instead of a medium. You can see this here: https://www.summitpost.org/valley-of-fi ... #chapter_7

On desktop view you can see no negative difference of the image quality from loading the small image. The only scenarios it becomes "lightly problematic" is for mobile and pages with few images due to the JS layout being reloaded to display the images at a larger size. A workaround for this would be to use a small snippet of CSS (.image {max-width: 100%; height auto;}) to prevent the image from stretching. Then the only minor draw back would be not having big images for small screens which to be honest isn't really much of a loss. Would be a much bigger gain for the site as a whole.

Also the profile images on the profiles themselves should source from the medium image instead of the original. Due to the profile images being smaller anyways it only steals away from the bandwidth.

Re REI (or some other corporate entity) taking over SP: they would almost certainly want some editorial control over content. An out-of-date route description that gets someone into trouble could put REI on the hook legally, even if there are dozens of disclaimers.

Re removing photos and pages with low scores and/or no content: In the case of mainly-blank pages, a simple script should detect these pages (e.g. by looking for text strings such as the default text seen on the boilerplate pages, or counting words and flagging anything with less than 100 words). Then, these can be summarily booted. And any photo with a 0-score and by someone inactive for a period of time, gets the boot. I am echoing a lot of this. I like these ideas.

Re annual fee... I'm beginning to warm to the idea if it means less ads and keeps SP alive.

It may be true that the majority of viewers are one-time viewers who google a particular mountain, see the SP link and look in for two minutes. But there are dozens (hundreds?) of contributors who take pride in their pages and images. Perhaps SP is not so much about just the facts about a peak, but a place to "honor" and post narratives about the world's peaks and routes. People who come here regularly like to read about peaks just for the fun of it. We can bait people with information for a climb, but then a percentage of them will want to stay and possibly add useful content. The "free" stuff would have the ads.

Any time people are asked to pay for something that had been ostensibly free, there'll be some backlash. So... suppose SP's council of elders were to just say "We will ditch all ads and charge users $10/yr for full access, and here's why..." (laying out the points already made). Could we do it? Get enough to cover costs? It'd make it clear if there's the support to do this, or not. But the alternative is ad-hell.