Like the sponsored links that offer cash for miles ?

for the mid-thread links.

Uh-oh, somebody is begging for a lecture!

As a reminder, advertising revenue does supplement the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly costs of maintaning the FT board.

Please let us know if there are ads that are against the general beliefs of the frequent travel industry, like selling your miles, and we will block those ads.

I have to admit that I find the responses from the administrators in this thread to be far less helpful than virtually all other comments I have seen from the House of Miles.

"We need the money, you should be grateful since that's what it takes to run a free site, so live with it," is what, rightly or wrongly, I infer from the tone of these responses.

Well, they're right. But since I find this particular form of ad as more intrusive than virtually any other, and since at some of the places I currently view FT, I can't install ad blockers (like at work),
the net effect is that I will look at FT less often.

It is a two way street. For example, I subscribed to the magazine as my way to "pay back" for FT, even though so far, everything I need I have found here first. So I don't feel guilty in suggesting that a little more sensitivity to the desires of FT viewers is appropriate, even if this is a free site.

Advertising is one thing. Advertising that is intrusive is quite another.

On this screen alone I see three ads: top banner ad, right banner ad, and ads in the threads themselves. Very disruptive.

There are plenty of other bulletin board sites that fund themselves through advertising and don't have this low-usability component built in.

I also agree with RichardinSF, the responses by admins here have left a little to be desired....

The administrator of this board -- myself -- simply said that advertising is not a technical issue. As the administrator I have no control over advertising, and I have not said anything like your quote. I simply have asked users to post these concerns in a forum where they may do you some good. I have posted the same thing every time a user has posted a concern about ads for the last 5 years.

Folks, just a friendly observation but I think John at Webflyer has clearly received our message that Flyertalk is slow and that most of us don't like the embedded ads. But as he says, he's trying to fix the speed issue and doesn't think it has anything to do with the new ads.
At any rate, the best place to state your views on this advertising might be over in the Only Randy Petersen forum in this active thread. Randy reads this thread and I'm sure will weigh in on the issue when he has time.
The time it's taking John to answer the increasingly angry questions here is time he could be spending on working on the speed issue.
Thanks...

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No offense to the administrator, but these ads are too much. Ugh. Please stop. Please!

I can mentally edit out the adds that show up and horizontal entries, between posts, but now they have started to show up inside posts, taking up most of the space and forcing the actual post into a narrow column on the right-had side of the block.

That really is annoying and much harder to ignore.

They don't bother me at all. They fit in rather well, arent blinking, flashing, or otherwise annoying. Pop ups are far worse.

Totally agree... not sure what the problem is.

How difficult is it to just continue to the next post....?

We do it with "annoying" posts/posters all the time... what is the difference with an ad?

William

Is this an ad or an "annoying" post/poster? I can't tell!

I'm sooooo confused!

For a while, Wharvey, the ads were actually showing up inside of the post, forcing the entire post into a narrow columnon the right side of the page. That was difficult to ignore.

Now they appear to be back between posts, where they are much easier to ignore.