I don't see it but I have AdFender installed so I guess it is blocking it. I do have the blank white space though, so it still takes up the room. Then again we're not paying for this so I guess someone has to make some money. It is still very annoying. AdFender is free, and there are many other free ad blockers out there.

Will,

Get rid of Internet Explorer 10 and its worthless pop up blocker.

Download Mozilla & Adblock Plus and move on.

Dave

Even with Adblock, it will probably be an empty white space there. I use windows 8 with touchscreen so I can just zoom in on the post part. While you can get rid of the ads, there is probably no way to make the posts take up that space short of zooming in which then makes the text annoyingly bigger.

Will, this is what it looks like for Dave and myself when we visit.

hmmm.

without ads, content is about 1/3 of the page. Is this acceptable?

Actually, the ads are just a minor thing to me. They're easy to ignore. It's maddening that in world of cheap computer storage, the posts simply disappear after a time unless they are "bumped up." If you consider that it sometimes takes hours to put together a photo gallery, it's lousy to see your work disappear.

Now we run into the problem that Edwin's facing. He's run out of bandwidth in his photobucket, so if we're to see more of his stuff, he has to pay money to upgrade to their premium service, all because GW only let's us post one pic per reply.

~Dave

I agree completely, Dave. The real problem is not so much the obnoxious ads, but rather the fact that the content is compressed into half the width of the screen. It would seem as if GW intentionally wanted give the photos less effective resolution. Maybe they don't want the pics to be bigger than the ads. My guess is that the Galleries were more of a problem to them even than they admit. Presumably they get paid on a per click basis, so if lots of folks are spending 20 min viewing a Gallery with 100 photos, they'll get paid 5% as much as if I viewed 20 diff pages for a minute each. Their business execs probably see it in exactly those terms. I really don't believe their stated excuse that they were getting a lot of complaints about the Galleries.

As far as photobucket, with a different e-mail address you should be able to get a new photobucket account, though I haven't tried this myself.

Alex

This post was edited by maple_grove on Fri, Sep 20, 13 at 9:42

I get the same as Will...most of the time the typed words run behind the adds and the adds cover over the right hand side of what has been said. I have to guess what has been said during that portion of type. Im no computer guru.....just a gardener. Been on here since 03 and the format is not as enjoyable as it once was. If the conifer forum group of people were not so fun,enjoyable, informative,friendly and helpful from around the globe on here....it would be easy to leave. I enjoy the people i have 'met' and the education i have recieved, but not the adds blocking print.

Al

Also to have to use Photobucket and not be able to post photos directly to the site is a pita...

Sara

What Davesconifers said. Never seen an ad....

"What Davesconifers said. Never seen an ad...."
Yea but... you still get the annoying blank spot, right? The screen shot that j0nd03 posted is what I see with AdFender. I don't see any way around the compressed area, at least you don't see the ad. They got it pretty much locked up.

The change was made a year or so ago.

It's all about money and they squeezed the photo size down to make room for more advertising to help their bottom line.

I don't really have any issues with Adblock Plus on.

I can left click on the mouse for the larger photo.

The complainers must remember it's free. I would assume if they take away the unwanted advertising to make everybody happy then guess what. You can join the new GW for $38.00 a year and post all your photos full page and complain about the high cost of doing this.

Who will be the first to high-five this new way of posting photos on the GW. No takers? I didn't think so.

Dave

Photobucket knows storage is cheap.

Just get another free email account and sign up for another photobucket account and you should double your storage and bandwidth.

I have not tested it with pb but I suspect it is best if you log into your account at least seasonally. I lost some hotmail stored data by not logging in for a long long long time.

Looks like this.

yup. That's new and QUITE annoying.

Yeah, it's reaching a frenzied peak. I tolerate ad banners but when they start to encroach on the actual purpose of the site, my loyalty waivers. There are huge scrolling ads now that 'follow' the screen if I scroll down and only disappear if you click the tiny x button or wait for them to jam their message into your brain.

Between that and a full one THIRD of the page being devotged strictly to advertisement, the gardenweb forums are heading towards apocalypse. I will NOT tolerate this continual bombardment for long. The worst part is that it really does seem to be getting more and more aggressive. Alex made a great point too that the Gardenweb forums perhaps didn't like the longer photo galleries because it limits the amount of 'hits' their ads get. Instead of a thread with 100 photos clicked once, they prefer 5 photos per thread clicked 20 times... It's a disturbing but very logical possibility.

In the end I've met a lot of people here, many of whom I consider friends. It's a great way to share ideas, photos, information and stories but I find myself posting and returning to the site less than once a week almost entirely because of the advertisement assault.

I *am* willing to pay for content, for the ability to use an online site, but I'd rather do so through the American Conifer Society, not to some greedy corporation looking to monetize my clicks with advertising.

I'll be around just not very much.

-Will

I'm not seeing THAT! That's really bad, time for a adblocker. They work pretty well and they're free. I also use Spywareblaster which is also free and stops all kinds of bad stuff, I'm wondering if the adds are the only thing getting by your system. Don't take this wrong way because I don't mean to insult your intelligence, really I don't, but you are using anti-virus right? I know people who don't use anything, I don't take anything for granted on the internet. You might have spyware/malware installed.

This post was edited by fairfield8619 on Sat, Sep 21, 13 at 0:32

I gladly would like to post here tons of pics but unfortunately Photobucket is holding me back...

I'll try to make another account with another email address.
Thanks for the tip :0)

This post was edited by coniferjoy on Sat, Sep 21, 13 at 11:25

Yep...my point being that folks spend less time looking at smaller pictures, or at least I do. There's just less detail to take in. I find it takes me less than half the time to make it through a 'Hobbiton conifers of the week' now that the photos are smaller. Time per page data is, I'm sure, available to and studied by GW. I'd say their strategy was successful. For one thing, the annual Galleries by species did not materialize this year :o(.

Maybe the ACS Blog section would be an appropriate home for the Hobbiton conifers of the week...

Alex

I don't know, Jon brings up some good points.

ACS is a non-profit organization that is targeted to a very select group of people and is funded by its members.

GardenWeb is a for profit organization that is targeted to the mass public. They pay for space including the price to optimize search engines (ever notice their presence when searching for cultivars and topics?). They have to pay for it somehow as we don't. GW brings in the masses and in many cases creates new gardeners everyday and in essence has a unique mission that so many look past on a daily basis. With all that said the moderators should be looking for ways to improve the user experience otherwise they lose people and clicks.

I'd have a couple maples and spruces in my yard if it was for this site. I just can't hate on the space and ads for this reason alone. The lack of gardeners for my generation is an absolute travesty and anything out there that adds one more gardener is a win regardless. The only people I know that are passionate about gardening are all in their 50s or 60s. Rarely do I come across someone in their 20s or 30s. With the inventory of homes on the market, younger people are buying homes at a faster rate too...which makes this situation worse.

Will, hopefully you can see the big picture and keep bringing your knowledge and discoveries to the table. There are more people out there than you think that you and many others influence everyday without even knowing.

Oh, and just get a damn ad blocker, lol. Hold ctrl and scroll your mouse in or out to zoom the GW content. If you have a laptop your touchpad should be able to zoom in and out with "pinching" like on a touchscreen/iPhone.

IMO, the ACS should picture themselves as a college football recruiter and view the GW conifer forum (as well as a couple others) as their recruiting hotbed. This doesn't mean their members have to spend every day on the forums. Just drop by every now and again at the least and influence the masses with a gallery or two on the DISCUSSION side of the forum and maybe answer a few questions if they have the time. (Who goes over to the gallery side???)

Every now and then they will land a big recruit like whaas while picking up raw recruits (newbs) along the way that may pan out to be just as hardcore about collecting and preservation as anyone =)

Many people have fallen in love with gardening by visiting these forums, many more than the number of active posters here for sure!

John

Ditto to those using adblockers - I don't see any of them.

Other places for pic storage:

Flickr - they've recently greatly extended (to one terabyte) what you can store there on a free account.

Wiki Commons - unlimited, provided you're willing to release the pics under a Creative Commons free license (CC-BY-SA or CC-BY) that allows other people to use them.

Resin