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Regarding the recent ad issues and what is going on with the site

Jared B

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As everyone is well aware we recently had an issue with ads basically taking over the whole forum. I wanted to start a conversation about why that happened and address some other things that I need to get taken care of on the forum.

First of all big thanks to @KcRay for sending me an email letting me know what was going on. The fact of the matter is that while it was not intentional, I do bear a lot of the responsibility for what happened. Google recently changed the way that they display ads, by starting to automatically place advertisements in places that they thought were optimal. This is something that I did previously have turned off but upon recently updating the forum software it seemed to enable it again. I have been so busy the past few months that I have barely been on the forum at all aside from checking in about once a week for some quick maintenance so I didn't notice that... 100% my fault.

That said, we do of course need to run advertisements to survive. It costs a lot to run the site, between hosting, purchasing spy photos, etc and a lot of time goes into site maintenance and the like. Auto ads are now off and there will be no intrusive ads run on this forum, I am very proud of the community that we have all built here, not only being the largest 5thGen specific community but also the most knowledgeable and commonly referred to by tons of pages. There is a lot of knowledge and great members here and as someone that has been using forums since the dawn of time, I know that they are the best resource for information so I definitely don't want to be losing members over stupid things like ads. There are now a maximum of 4 ads that will run on any given page, one at the top, one at the bottom and one after the first post in a thread with one before the last post in a thread. Again that is the MAXIMUM number of ads that you would see on a whole page. I got rid of the sidebar ad and on the sidebar, you now only see the small ads for the site sponsors.

For those that are running ad blockers, I would like to ask that you whitelist this site as our advertising strategy is minimalistic but at the end of the day, it's totally up to you.

There are also other ways that you can support the site, by subscribing to our YouTube channel, becoming a site supporter, sharing our articles on social media, or by checking out our newly designed shirts and hoodies.

There are other things that I need to work on as well with the site and will be hard at work on them this week, such as fixing the new posts issue, looking at limiting signature lengths and a few other things. I will now be on the forum a lot more than before as I have been laid off with everything going on in the world these days, but I also finally bit the bullet and bought a 5thGen truck so I now have some relevant things to talk about on the forums lol.

I would also like to add some more moderators as well, if you're an established member with a good post history and would be interested in becoming a moderator, shoot me a message. If you guys think of any members that should be moderating let me know, for the most part this is a very easy community to work with.

TL:DR I apologize for the recent advertising takeover, it was absolutely not intentional and will not happen again.

I'll end this post off with some photos of my new 2020 Longhorn EcoDiesel:

_DSC2993.jpg _DSC2997.jpg _DSC3009-Enhanced.jpg
 
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