At last, we have a solution for people who meet those criteria: Sign up for a No Ad Subscription. $3/month, $30/year. All you have to do is log in as you and the annoying awful ads magically disappear.
If you have no money, we promise to keep the free ad-laden version available for you.
If you have problems making it work, don’t complain to me, I can do nothing, nothing I tell you — but Jason Thibeault has a complaint thread. Go there.
Also, let’s be 100% clear on something: all this service does is block ads. If you’ve been banned, don’t expect to plunk down $3 and get un-banned — you’ll still be able to read an ad-free site, but nothing in the service guarantees you a right to comment.
Okay, so now how do I remind myself that Mormons Believe In Jesus Christ Find Out More at Mormon.org?
I’ll keep a link to your post here handy, Anthony K. I’ll pop in to remind you occasionally, on a schedule of your choosing. ;)
Oh, this sounds interesting. No problem at home, but at work, sometimes bad ads will reload multiple times accessing a thread. Makes it hard to easily return to the main page, as all I see with a left click on the return button is the ad all the way down.
But if there were no ads, there wouldn’t have been that moment of delicious irony seeing “You Are a Child of God” from mormon.org just about the first title, which was “Do you hate ads?”
Am I odd in that I don’t mind the adds, and usually find them amusing? I know alot of people will be glad about this though!
But the ads are the best part!
http://freethoughtblogs.com/cuttlefish/2013/10/31/but-the-ads-are-the-best-part/
And what if I want to find a nice Christian girl to Christian date?
I don’t have a paypal account, but I had no problem paying via credit card as a “guest”.
This blog post is an ad.
Yay, no ads—and an easy way to support the site!
But we’re all just sockpuppets driving up your traffic!
Nerd @3:
I wonder if thats the problem I have been facing with my phone. I have lost count of how many times I have kept a tab open here while I go research some information to copy/paste, only to come back to the thread and each time the page reloads. Sometimes it takes over a minute to finish loading (I also love clicking ‘jump to comment box’, doing so, and then being returned to the top of the page)
Ads? What ads? I use the AdBlocker browser extension so I don’t see any ads…
I’d be happy to get a sub, but I will not, under any circumstances, ever even tangentially use Paypal, gorrram filthy thieves.
Purely hypothetical: Let’s say you are some dude, who just randomly decided to donate 5 bucks earlier this week. Would you give him ad immunity for a month even though he donated before it was announced?
^ Paypal will only be thievin’ on FTB, not you.
Re #13:
Yes, I have no idea what he’s talking about either. All praise to ABP!
@vexorian
Nope. In my experience, money goes into Paypal and doesn’t come out. The intended recipient doesn’t get it, and it never comes back to me. It would be easier, and just as effective, to set a small pile of cash on fire.
Firefox and Adblock Plus. No problem.
Yes yes, we all know what adblock is for, thank you. But ads are money for the bloggers. I want to support them, but I don’t want ads, hence subscription. You just want all this content without supporting the writers, fine, go ahead, but don’t brag about it.
@ Dave
The ads only pay when they are sponsors (in which case my viewing of the ad has no effect on the contribution, but my viewing of the site at all does through visit stats) or if you click on it, and as is often the case, subsequently buy something at the destination.
My viewing of the ads has no effect on the content provider, and since I was never going to click on an ad anyway, it’s all the same now as it was before.
@Dave, ex-Kwisatz Haderach #19: Agreed.
John Horstman: you and Dave are equally wrong. Using ABP harms the bloggers and network in no way at all unless you would have clicked on the ads without it. Seeing the ads but not clicking them helps nobody. (At least that’s my understanding; I could be convinced otherwise.)
That said, subscribing will help the bloggers no matter how you feel about ads.
I suspect you are wrong loopsyel. Everything I can find on google (and there are huge amounts written about this) agrees with that assessment. But I admit, I’m not so good with the computers, and know very little about how this all works (pretty sure there are elves in the wires that bring me things I want to see). So if you’d like to link something that shows adblock doesn’t negatively affect ad revenue, I’d be happy to read it.
A lot of websites have pay-per-view ads instead of pay-per-click, so just loading the ad might sometimes help. There’s no way to know if you don’t know if the ads are pay-per-click, or pay-per-view or even pay-per-time (in which case everybody could use Adblock and it wouldn’t matter).
loopsyel, that is entirely dependent upon what agreement you have. Usually there is some kind of pay for views, with an add-on for click-throughs and people buying stuff.
It’s nice to have iceweasel’s preferences + adblock edge + noscript to already block ads, javascipt, and nonessential cookies, and it’s nice to not have adobe flash or any other non-open source software installed. I like being able to control my internet experience.
If I had money that I can afford to spend right now, I’d consider donating.
I agree that the religious ads are funny: I can also learn ancient Hebrew to get closer to god – it would be easier if he spoke English to me.
The irony wears a bit thin after a while reading article after article about misogyny and MRAs while surrounded by ads for ‘male only gamers’ featuring pictures of nearly naked, disproportionately breasted, cartoon women face down in dirt with pained expressions on their faces.
What Ads??????????
Yikes!… I just looked at this site with IE and quickly decided I like my FireFox with Adblock.
I too use Adblock, so I’ve never seen any ads, on this site or any other, but thirty bucks a year sounds like a good deal to me, so I’m in.
Every computer I use has adblock installed, my sanity requires it, however I had a solid days well paid work today so I subscribed anyway.
FTB is an education., I don’t mind paying for that.
Just a thought here. If you have to offer people to pay to not see something on your site, are you not doing this particular something wrong? Isn’t the real problem that the current batch of ads on FtB is utterly misplaced wrt target audience and hence entirely useless for most readers?
I can imagine ads for, err, atheist socialising, pottery, books, gadgets, convention tickets, even food/drinks etc, that people would not actually mind seeing or clicking.
For me, currently this just means I’m not accessing FtB from work anymore, because the Casino ads that spring up are somewhat frowned upon by my employer’s IT department.
Rorschach, as I understand how the ad server works, the ads are not tied to FTB, they’re tied to your browsing habits and cookies. Spend time googling the church, get ads for Bibles. Spend time researching college options, get ads for textbooks. I get ads for nursing schools and yarn, for example.
Only very losely, I reckon, if at all. I get gambling popups(when disabling adblock) despite not ever browsing any sites related to gambling. I get Christian hookup ads despite not ever browsing either hookup sites or Christian sites. I don’t ever store cookies. I don’t use google to search. So I think this “tailored ad” thing is a bit of a myth.
I’m at a loss to link my browsing habits to that woman with the thousand-yard stare who claims that reading the Book of Mormon brings her closer to Jesus. About the only religious activities online I have are visiting this site and writing critical comments about Orson Scott Card.
Ok, subscribed. I won’t notice any difference as I use Adblock, but I get a lot out of FTB, so even though my current income is not large (but I do have assets, adn the prospect of an increase), $30/year doesn’t seem a big ask!
If I didn’t have the ads, how would I know that Mormons are really Christians? Or what God has planned for me?
Adblock is a wonderful thing. I do miss the little ads I had before on the left side, they were almost always hilariously inappropriate.