I switched over to IE just to see what the fuss was about.

II can tell you now that I've never clicked through on any FT ad. Granted, some of these may be pay by impression, but, you're not making any money off me. I'd gladly pay FT some monthly subscription fee and skip the ads.

Now without doing clickstream anaylsis, I'd suspect that the more frequent users of FT are the least likely to click through on a web ad, whereas the casual passer-by would be more likley to click through.

Therefore, if you offer a subscription-based, ad-free version, FT should be able to increase revenues with minimal impact on the click through rate.

Then again, I may be 100% wrong, but it sounds good to me.

ARGH!!!! One of these stupid ads is blocking out the first post on this thread so that I can't even read it. I will NEVER click on an FT ad or ever even considering buying something advertised here. You have gone too far this time. What are you trying to do -- see how much hate you can generate towards your sponsors?

Because the topics of the ads are generally lame.

BTW, there's now "Ads by Google" when you reply to a thread.

I'd like to know if only the first post is considered or the entire page of posts is considered. And if the latter, does the ad change over time as the content of the thread evolves?

So for example, if I start talking about adblocking sofware and search engine optimization on this reply, will the ads start to change?

A discussion about these ads on the UA board had this solution:

"These new ads are over the line. I didnt mind (and understood the need for) the ads on the side, could even live with the horizontal ads in between posts, but this is lame, simple solution, edit your hosts file to add the following lines:

127.0.0.1 a.tribalfusion.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com

and (assuming your not running a web server on your machine) you will no longer get any ads (on the side or in the posts)"

How do you edit your hosts file and add these lines?

Replied to the wrong thread

Indeed, maybe I'm reading a bit too much into things here.

I read flyertalk (in this case Tim @ WebFlyer) as saying the placement o fthe ads inside posts was not a glitch. I read Randy as saying this was something that was accepted on the Flyertalk end, that this is delegated to folks esp. Karen @ Webflyer but that he's now looking at it since it's been brought to his attention.

In other words, it wasn't something that Randy had explicitly intended, and he's willing to reconsider things?

Deleted............

This works only on Windows (AFAIK). Go to the folder

C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc

(This is the default folder on Win XP. Could be different in your system. You can also just search for a file called "hosts").

There should be a file called "hosts" (no extension); if there isn't one, create it. Edit the file with notepad. Add those two lines. Restart your computer. Voila, all ads gone .

I also want to voice my opposition, and this makes me LESS likely to pay for an ad-free version.

The admins and Randy should keep in mind that FTers are an educated bunch who can learn to block the ads if needed. On the other hand, most of us would he happy to support FT. I think that directly asking to contribute by donating some money and/or clicking some discrete ads would be far more productive than this obnoxious advertisements.

This is a bad decision to place these new ads. Real bad.

I hate it; it greatly lessens my enjoyment of reading and participating in FlyerTalk.

I didn't like the ads on the right hand side when they started, but learned to live with them.

I didn't like the ads in the middle of the posts, but I learned to live with them.

I didn't like the pop-up ads that went around my pop-up blocking browser, but I lived with them.

Today, I can live with them no longer. And thanks to some handy posts, they are gone. I would support an ad-free version with cash without a doubt. Certainly more than the pathetic click through ads probably generate on a per-user basis. But those pleas have gone un-answered as best I can determine. So now I can guarantee my click through rate will be exactly 0%. I enjoy and learn a great deal here; hope it doesn't hurt business too much.

Perfect!!! Thanks for the Windows tutorial...worked like a charm -- ads gone!

Ditto!

iwillflytheworld, many thanks for the step-by-step instruction. ^ Wow! now I have to get used to the new clean FT screen!

Add my vote to the "these new ads are crap", and "this has motivated me enough to modify my local settings to block this crap that I will never click on anyway"

I'm really not in the market for aircraft engines (well, I'd like to be, but I don't think I can afford the aircraft to go with it).

If you want money from me, I will gladly pay a small monthly or yearly fee to visit Flyertalk ad-free.

....... works great on a Macintosh running Firefox.

woo hoo!

(for as much as I use FT, I would certainly put the money where my big mouth is and cough up for an online subscription... as long as this really means no ads for real when I'm using FT)