Skimlinks

[KS95]

I don't see these as I use an adblocker (but I also donate to RD!) but a member recently posted this in the Racer section so I thought I'd forward it to the support/feedback section

The forum seems to be using skimlinks in user posts now. I don't mind these things if they are in official website articles and the likes, but they have no place in forum posts where they appear to represent the opinion or affiliation of users. In my reading of the terms and rules they shouldn't even be allowed in the first place.

(original post)

And..

Whether it is visible to me all the time or not doesn't matter in my opinion. Of course it can be blocked, but the forum software is still putting advertisement links onto keywords in the posts users make. They are in your posts, they are in my posts, boomer's, Dave's and everybody elses posts if they contain certain vocabulary.

I'll say again that I think that is fine if it is applied to articles, product reviews or news posts that are released in an official RD forum kind of way. If that is the image that RD wants to portray within their messages I have no issue with it.

To allow it to be acting on user posts is not alright however, because as a user I did not agree to advertise third party businesses within my utterances. In fact, the forum rules explicitely state that any form of advertising is forbidden. I do not put ads on my video uploads on a certain popular site either, because it is my choice not to do so. They asked me, I chose. If you go into my post on the first page of the RC6 release thread, where I mention some PC hardware bits, it now links to an online shop - I'm not a spam bot who hides links in his messages, so why does RD make me look like one now?

Put ads on the front page, the site background and so on, if you have to - but leave the discussions and exchange of information free of it like any decent forum does.

(original post)

He raises a point, imo.

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Getting a bit tired of this (not you btw ). If we had a decent income I could laugh about it but seeing this months bill and the joke of a revenue becasue 40% of our members using adblockers or simply ignore any cry for help to chip in an help us out, ill just ignore it for now.

Quickly going to step away from my keyboard now before I post something that I regret tomorrow. More later.

 

[KS95]

Getting a bit tired of this (not you btw ). If we had a decent income I could laugh about it but seeing this months bill and the joke of a revenue becasue 40% of our members using adblockers or simply ignore any cry for help to chip in an help us out, ill just ignore it for now.

Quickly going to step away from my keyboard now before I post something that I regret tomorrow. More later.

I understand I see you can only buy one premium membership at a time so is there any way to just donate with paypal?

(not you btw )

Thanks for that btw!

 

[Justin Swan]

I'm lost to what this is referring to? I see no ads?

 

[Tom]

I'm lost to what this is referring to? I see no ads?

One of the perks of being a premium member.

Bram is putting something together atm, stay tuned for his update!

 

[Mr Whippy]

I was looking at what we get if we pay for a subscription and though much is nice not much appeals to me at all really.
Lots of stuff for social people, but not so much stuff for anti-social people like me


What I would like to see are things like file uploading. Right now I might be working on a project or ideas and want to upload small 500k zip files but simply can't do it without using my own hosting but then it's all the linking and silliness for small files.

Forums used to just be for talking and collaborating and it's really hard to do that now when you can't converse with some quick and easy in-line file sharing going on too!

It's the one thing I bash my head against a wall wanting to do which I could do on freebie forums like this over a decade ago but can't seem to today.


So add that feature and I'll subscribe for a year!

Cheers

Dave

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Hi,

Unless I misunderstand what you mean with fileuploading but we have the resource manager active for quite some time: http://www.racedepartment.com/forum/resources/

 

[Jebus]

I'm lost to what this is referring to? I see no ads?

Yeah, I'm not using any add blockers, just opera's own manual blocking system but nothing is blocked here at RD, and I've tried to find these links from posts but no luck so far.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Hi,

Unless I misunderstand what you mean with fileuploading but we have the resource manager active for quite some time: http://www.racedepartment.com/forum/resources/

This is exactly my point, I don't want to spend all that time adding meta tags, defining categories (none of which exist for shader files for a small test track in Racer), and all that other stuff.
From what I can see the resource manager is quite OTT for what I need.

I don't want people to 'rate' my download, or anything. I just want to put a link to a zip in a thread automatically, just like forums 'used to do'


It's for this reason that half the stuff that should be on the forums and shared for those interested (who read the thread, shock horror how about that for UI logic!), is instead now going into group emails because I can attach a file! Shock, another major advancement, emails with FILES inside them. Wow!

Yes, I can even put it in there and in THAT email, describe the file contents. The file is only ever found in context with that email. Amazing.

So we could use this technology on forums? Yes! We can put that link in your thread, in all the context it ever needs, and provide hosting AND the link all in a few clicks! Wow... amazing.


But now someone invented 'social media' (just the internet for people without brains and severe 'look at me' disorders) which appears to be dumbing the life out of the internet, forcing us to share everything and tell everyone what the hell I'm doing uploading a 512kb texture with a checker pattern on it with a shader file so we can test some shader ideas... and because it doesn't fit into the existing resource manager categories I'd have to put it in some other category, and then I'd get some cretin whinging because I didn't follow the right process or didn't know how to click the right button to add XYZ ahrhrhghsdkjgsdfnjlnjkdkjnKNJ!"!!!!!!


Attach file, zip. How hard? Not very. I'll subscribe if you add it. I won't support the forum if you don't support logical uses of forums that avoid the use of attention seeking whore 'media'

Rant over.

Good forums, but they are going down hill as 'forums' the more you break the forum part of it.

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Instead of ranting maybe you could have taken a look into the download sections on the forum it self and you would see that its perfectly integrated into discussions posts.

You are mixing so many things up in your rant that I am not even going to bother replying with a proper explanation.

Bottom line is that forum post attachments are stored in the database and can therefore only contain small files which we disallow. Instead there is a state of the art resource manager with a seperate 1TB disc for free, rapid and smooth file sharing.

Sounds all very 2013 to me but hey I am a social media people without brains...

Don't like what we do, then please do not take a subscription and just continue as a normal user, no hard feelings at all. I wouldn't donate to a site that I don't like either so we agree on that

 

[Cosmo°]

Going slightly back on topic, I haven't seen any skimlinks since monday, which is positive. Really the reason why I posted about this in our subforum is because there was no official info on this and I wanted to raise awareness within the community I frequent.

The lack of communication regarding such changes to the site is what sits a bit uneasy for me. When I was looking through a thread from earlier this year I noticed a link had appeared in one of my posts and I knew that it wasn't placed there by myself. So of course I get a bit suspicious and check it out to find it's an advertisement. What would your first thoughts be? I considered a security issue either side of the forum or myself, because there is no information about the addition of such a "feature" anywhere to be found in this area of the forum or the frontpage. A bit more research and it became clear that it's "only" intrusive advertisement.

I don't fancy this particular kind of advertisement because it alters the content of user posts and that is what I wrote in my original messages. Seeing as there is still no official response regarding the matter (maybe I should take the absence of these links over the last few days as an answer?), there was no need for me to post here any earlier.

In closure, as I said in my other posts regarding this, I'm not against advertisement in general. I'm a non-paying member and I can live with the consequences. For more than ten years I've been working on hundreds of projects for a free driving simulation with many members of our community and that is the way I "pay back". This doesn't mean that I have to feel bad about voicing my opinion. I say this not to put myself on a pedestal, but as a direct response to Bram's first reply in this thread, which you could say is a bit open ended