SummitPost.org

I'm going to be the first to plead ignorance when it comes to advertising on website A, B, C etc...
I don't know the coding; where, why or how ad sites choose to "infect" websites with paltry advertising. All I know is that these second party websites pay hosting fees and in turn receive payment for posting for their clients. I think that's about right. Right??

Anyway, if this is your job, if this is your specialty, shouldn't "those" people be aware not all websites are the same when it comes to coding, layout, format.... and maybe, want to pound out details so as not to disrupt normal traffic on 'that' site? Thus creating an opposite intended affect?

I've revamped one of my pages and I've found that using the old method eliminates all the shit that pops up vs. the newer way, FYI.
I believe Matt when he says this is just a trial run. I'm still down to help pay fees associated with running this site (The storage issues alone must be a pain in the ass), but if you, Matt (elves...) can get the kinks worked out on the advertising to help curtail costs, you'll have no arguments/issues from me.


Like Chugach mtn boy stated, this is a voluntary site. We devout our time to creating kick-ass pages. But I can tell you one thing, sure as shit, I'm not clicking on ANY fu*king ads on this site and I'm not buying ANY fu*king product advertised on this site......unless they're selling barrel-aged stouts.
Just sayin....

Lodewijk wrote:The amount of ads is ridiculous, but the way they are popping up in the middle of pages is even worse.
The whole layout of many pages is screwed up...
I normally like creating pages here on SP, but to be honest this might stop me from creating any more.

I can only agree! Even for a try and hopefully only lasting for some time this is annoying. Parts of the layout of my recent pages are f*ed up and some ads "try to blend" with my texts and pics.
I planned to add about five new pages in the next weeks but I rather wait what comes up .....

I took Vid Pogachnik's advice and installed the Google Chrome Ad Blocker and beautiful Summitpost is back.

I can't edit pages or scroll from side to side on the pages because the ads cover the scroll bar.

I know a contract is a contract, but if there are not binding terms, please end this now, not when this update almost none of us know about happens (another issue itself).

Two days ago, I turned off my ad blocker. Wow.

This site's content is driven by volunteers, and if people haven't noticed, quality contributors have steadily declined in recent years.

We volunteers who remain do not at all appreciate that our work serves to promote pop-up ads and these ridiculous page-wide ads that occur between paragraphs.

If SP is so strapped for operating money that it has to resort to what we are seeing now, maybe SP needs to do what MP did and sell out. MP has all kinds of links to its owner now, but at least you can view pages without the awful, intrusive ads.

Just let us know. If SP sells out the way MP did, we contributors need either (a) the ability to share in the revenue, or (b) a reasonable grace period during which we can delete our content before it becomes corporate revenue the way the MP pages have.

As a long-time SP member and someone who believes SP is still the best online source of mountaineering info, I hope the "We" (it does not include the elves at large) are in tune enough that as they change this site to mirror the ideas of a few, they do not alienate the many.

Again, here are the facts:
1) There are no more ads than before.
2) The current randomization of the ad placement on pages is a very temporary test that isn't going to be removed before the switch to a responsive design for SP.
3) Within 2 weeks the entire site will look drastically different once it is made responsive (and secure with HTTPS). This has been in the works for 2+ years to address Google's penalization of non-responsive sites.
Read here: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6196932?hl=en
More information here: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+ ... e+websites
4) Ad placement on the site once it is responsive and secure will look and function differently than it does now. The ads themselves will be responsive.
5) Anyone posting about ad placement right now is wasting their time because it's not changing again before the site moves to a responsive design. Again, this will almost certainly happen a week or so from today.

Once the responsive design for SummitPost is in place, input and feedback about all aspects of the design (including ad placement) will be welcomed and keenly listened to.

My guess is ad placement within the new layout won't be much of a concern to anyone. I'm more concerned with the fact that making the website responsive will almost certainly break the formatting of quite a number of pages on SP because of the flexibility granted to page creation here (people can use any HTML, javascript, etc., that they want when creating a page which means there is no standardization of page construction). Flexibility is great for allowing creative and beautiful pages, but comes at the expensive of having no standardization which makes any changes to the site nearly impossible to make without breaking some pages. Unfortunately, in order for SP to stay relevant in the search engines, the change has to be made to make the site responsive.

Montana Matt wrote:... I'm more concerned with the fact that making the website responsive will almost certainly break the formatting of quite a number of pages on SP because of the flexibility granted to page creation here (people can use any HTML, javascript, etc., that they want when creating a page which means there is no standardization of page construction). Flexibility is great for allowing creative and beautiful pages, but comes at the expensive of having no standardization which makes any changes to the site nearly impossible to make without breaking some pages. Unfortunately, in order for SP to stay relevant in the search engines, the change has to be made to make the site responsive.

Good to know that this is coming. I'll reserve some time to go through my pages once the change is implemented. I've used HTML quite a bit, but always knew that that could mean extra work for me after future site updates, and I fully accepted that. I hope that most of it still works, and that I can easily fix whatever doesn't look good anymore. When I've got the hang of the new site and have updated my own pages, I'll be happy to help out others. Feel free to ask.

As for javascript, I helped out Klenke with his article "Distance to the Center of the Earth" and that relies heavily on javascript (and, partly because of that, it can only be edited in the old editor). I certainly hope that that will still work. Without javascript, I wouldn't know how to save the article and that would be a pity.

rgg wrote:I hope that most of it still works, and that I can easily fix whatever doesn't look good anymore. When I've got the hang of the new site and have updated my own pages, I'll be happy to help out others. Feel free to ask.

Thanks for that Rob. I believe that nearly all pages will look nearly the same on a desktop layout, though some might break a bit. The pages that are most likely to have formatting issues are the ones where there is a page element with a fixed width that won't resize to the width of a tablet or phone with a narrow screen.

rgg wrote:As for javascript, I helped out Klenke with his article "Distance to the Center of the Earth" and that relies heavily on javascript (and, partly because of that, it can only be edited in the old editor). I certainly hope that that will still work. Without javascript, I wouldn't know how to save the article and that would be a pity.

Nothing will change in that regard. All of the CSS and javascript that is used on pages will still be allowed to be used for now. It is a security risk for the site, but without allowing such things, many, many great pages would not work.

Montana Matt wrote:The pages that are most likely to have formatting issues are the ones where there is a page element with a fixed width that won't resize to the width of a tablet or phone with a narrow screen.

There are many such pages. Some typical elements in this regard are big images (i.e. much wider than 500px) and tables, more specifically tables with several images in a row. I've used both, and many others have used them too.

I always assumed that any device will add scrollbars if and when necessary; doesn't that solve any problems with such pages? I mean, I'm not saying that it will be dead easy to read something when you've got to do a whole lot of scrolling, but that's just the consequence of trying to view a lot of information on a small screen.

rgg wrote:I always assumed that any device will add scrollbars if and when necessary; doesn't that solve any problems with such pages?

Yes, that is the default behavior for most elements, such as tables, that are too wide to fit on the screen.

rgg wrote:I mean, I'm not saying that it will be dead easy to read something when you've got to do a whole lot of scrolling, but that's just the consequence of trying to view a lot of information on a small screen.

Right. It's not ideal in terms of presentation, but I suppose it's not "broken" to the point where it's unreadable either. It really depends on how the author of the page intends the information to be presented.

matt have you given any thought to running some affiliate links a la bill middlebrook on 14ers.com? somehow bill is able to make his site work without ads throwing up all over the page; that site is a hell of a lot less ad cluttered than this site. i'd be more than happy to click through a link (or three) when i'm getting ready to buy something if it helps defray some of your cost.

bscott wrote:matt have you given any thought to running some affiliate links a la bill middlebrook on 14ers.com? somehow bill is able to make his site work without ads throwing up all over the page; that site is a hell of a lot less ad cluttered than this site.

It's an idea, but the problem is we're comparing apples and oranges there. 14ers.com doesn't get the amount of traffic nor does it have the number of images (which require a lot of disk space and bandwidth to serve). From here:
https://northcutt.com/tools/free-seo-to ... s-checker/

14ers.com has 34,900 pages indexed in Google at this moment.
summitpost.org has 349,000 pages indexed in Google at this moment.

14ers.com is similar in size and traffic to FlytrapCare.com (my website). That server costs very little to run. SummitPost server configuration and files storage is crazy expensive each month. A few affiliate links isn't going to come close to covering the server fees.

Montana Matt wrote:It's an idea, but the problem is we're comparing apples and oranges there.

assuming your stats are correct (and i have no reason to think they aren't), is it not proportional? in other words, more traffic means more referrals to external sites means more commission to you? perhaps not, but certainly it's not an apples to oranges problem, maybe an oranges to tangerines problem.

i'm not saying it's the only answer, but is it - along with other ideas, like maybe cloud storage for photos - part of a possible solution that doesn't involve eleventy billion intrusive ads? because as it currently sits, i now use an ad blocker to view your site. which gets you zero percent of what you'd get from me if you posted a referral link. and from the looks of the comments in this thread, i'm not the only one heading that direction.

bscott wrote:assuming your stats are correct (and i have no reason to think they aren't), is it not proportional? in other words, more traffic means more referrals to external sites means more commission to you?

The simple answer is "no" it's not proportional. But to some small extent "yes" it is proportional. The issue is that we're talking about $200-$400 per month on server fees versus over $2000 per month. I could pay out of pocket for 14ers.com server fees and it really wouldn't impact our life all that much (which my guess is currently happening at 14ers. I really doubt they get much revenue from the affiliate links. Though they might get some money in other ways I don't know about -- I've not looked into it). But the same isn't true about SP server fees.

bscott wrote:i'm not saying it's the only answer, but is it - along with other ideas, like maybe cloud storage for photos - part of a possible solution that doesn't involve eleventy billion intrusive ads?

We already use the cloud for photo storage and serving. The cost is realized in bandwidth (and to some smaller extent storage) when transferring those photos to people who request pages where those images are embedded. Bandwidth is expensive. Storage is less so.

bscott wrote:because as it currently sits, i now use an ad blocker to view your site. which gets you zero percent of what you'd get from me if you posted a referral link.

That's true. But the majority of people don't use an ad blocker. And 99.99% of the revenue generated from this website comes from ads served to people coming in from search engines such as Google, Bing, or others. Affiliate marketing (referral) generates the least revenue of the most commonly used tools.

bscott wrote:and from the looks of the comments in this thread, i'm not the only one heading that direction.

That's also true. Which is obviously problematic.

Again, the reality is that these new ad placements are only temporary; a test. Once the new site is launched, the "eleventy billion intrusive ads" likely won't be a hot topic of conversation.

Montana Matt wrote:The changes are temporary at best because the entire site is going to look drastically different in a few days to a couple of weeks (at most).

That was written on November 21. Has there been a delay?