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Changes to the Politics (Cloak Room) coming soon


immamac

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they're gone 🤘

it just took me like 15 minutes before i realized i was 'seeing' ads, if you know what i mean...weird how conditioned we are! i was like 'ugh, shut UP' click-click and finally was like...'wait...wha...where am i??' 😄

thanks

ETA: also i might be a little high, that could explain it 🤭

Edited by mchookem
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8 minutes ago, elfenix said:

i saw the banner and was going to neg you but i guess this is cool.  plebs can pay for bandwidth.  should turn them on in DT too. 

Yeah I left over 100k on the table this election cycle from not showing ads. Pretty big fuckup on my end. 

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On 3/19/2021 at 10:20 PM, immamac said:

Yeah I left over 100k on the table this election cycle from not showing ads. Pretty big fuckup on my end. 

i suppose it is a chicken/egg question we will soon find out about...as much as everyone whines about cr, it is far and away - like, not even close - the second highest traffic part of the board behind the football board which has an even more overwhelming number of dumbfuck hot takes as cr.  when you disincentivize traffic there by making it utterly unnavigable (as it is now), there will be secondary/tertiary traffic effects for the site overall.

but i have never owned/operated a website for purposes of generating revenue, much less a message board so i know fuck all about it.  could be wrong i guess.

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17 minutes ago, sidis said:

i suppose it is a chicken/egg question we will soon find out about...as much as everyone whines about cr, it is far and away - like, not even close - the second highest traffic part of the board behind the football board which has an even more overwhelming number of dumbfuck hot takes as cr.  when you disincentivize traffic there by making it utterly unnavigable (as it is now), there will be secondary/tertiary traffic effects for the site overall.

but i have never owned/operated a website for purposes of generating revenue, much less a message board so i know fuck all about it.  could be wrong i guess.

I have seriously considered splitting off CR entirely but still linking back and forth like it's "one site". CR is the biggest and highest traffic political board in Texas. It's actually pretty incredible. 

I'm not really doing it to generate revenue, I'm doing it because sports and politics just don't mix well and the main purpose for this site is sports, but somehow for 60% of the year it's actually a big ass politics board that sorta has some sports. 

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Just now, cactusflinthead said:

Do it. DailyKos has ads for NewsMax. Zero fucks given. Take their money.

this was 100% my fuckup it was due to the technical limitation that I worked around to enable ads now...my ad partners had the campaigns ready to go and I had no way to segregate the traffic and show a different ad experience until I just sat down and spent a whole day figuring it out. 

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1 minute ago, immamac said:

I have seriously considered splitting off CR entirely but still linking back and forth like it's "one site". CR is the biggest and highest traffic political board in Texas. It's actually pretty incredible. 

I'm not really doing it to generate revenue, I'm doing it because sports and politics just don't mix well and the main purpose for this site is sports, but somehow for 60% of the year it's actually a big ass politics board that sorta has some sports. 

which goes to show you, just like every other sports board in the world...that if you get a bunch of predominately white dudes who love college sports together on a website and you don't give them a outlet to go to post tits and post political hot takes, you will poison the primary board and create a moderating nightmare. it will always find a way through. see your frustration of dealing with dt or with the eyes of texas thread on the football board.

ironically though, when i read most of the football takes from all the morons that populate the football board, i am even more dismayed than i am reading ttom and immortal's political dumbfuckery.  which is amazing.

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8 hours ago, immamac said:

I have seriously considered splitting off CR entirely but still linking back and forth like it's "one site". CR is the biggest and highest traffic political board in Texas. It's actually pretty incredible. 

I'm not really doing it to generate revenue, I'm doing it because sports and politics just don't mix well and the main purpose for this site is sports, but somehow for 60% of the year it's actually a big ass politics board that sorta has some sports. 

Just my opinion but I think splitting it off would be a mistake and would decrease traffic volume. I have no written report which backs that opinion up but I do believe that would be the case. Just a hunch/opinion.

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7 minutes ago, immamac said:

It would still be linked the same way visually. Just behind the scenes it would be different rep and post count etc etc. Different bans, can ban people from everything but politics or visa versa. 

Ah. Then it probably doesn’t matter too much. What’s the advantage though?

And I guess I’m asking financially to clarify the question.

Edited by JimmyJames
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On 3/19/2021 at 10:20 PM, immamac said:

Yeah I left over 100k on the table this election cycle from not showing ads. Pretty big fuckup on my end. 

This blows my mind, as in I didn't think it was that lucrative.  Damn...

Just FYI, when browsing on my home laptop, I don't get the ads( maybe popup blocker is the reason.)  I see them on my ipad and phone devices.

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On 3/23/2021 at 11:05 AM, immamac said:

I have seriously considered splitting off CR entirely but still linking back and forth like it's "one site". CR is the biggest and highest traffic political board in Texas. It's actually pretty incredible. 

I'm not really doing it to generate revenue, I'm doing it because sports and politics just don't mix well and the main purpose for this site is sports, but somehow for 60% of the year it's actually a big ass politics board that sorta has some sports. 

As long as I can toggle between sports and politics I'm good. 

With the occasional side trip into boobs,tacos, and music.

I don't think they will let me leave the landscape threads.

 

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On 3/23/2021 at 9:05 AM, immamac said:

I have seriously considered splitting off CR entirely but still linking back and forth like it's "one site". CR is the biggest and highest traffic political board in Texas. It's actually pretty incredible. 

 

How do you know this? You probably have some inside info, but I'd figure that there would be other sites that would be just Texas Politics.

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The window ads are terrible and the pages in thread re loaded 3x before I could scroll through- then I quit trying to follow the conversation. Maybe there’s a way to run ads without making the board un readable? Maybe not and this is a way to force people to pay up to be ad free. Personally I read CR less since the ads and haven’t bothered posting. 

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On 3/23/2021 at 7:54 PM, immamac said:

It would still be linked the same way visually. Just behind the scenes it would be different rep and post count etc etc. Different bans, can ban people from everything but politics or visa versa. 

Are you ever going to put in the policy of someone who goes Cloak Room in a non-CR thread is only allowed to post in CR for a month or something?

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On 4/3/2021 at 4:27 PM, Beau Vine said:

Are you ever going to put in the policy of someone who goes Cloak Room in a non-CR thread is only allowed to post in CR for a month or something?

And please post a diagram so dummies like me can understand wtf is going on with that rule. 

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5 hours ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

Yeah, the ads are causing everything to jump around and make it difficult to scroll through things or even click on the appropriate thread.

If only there was a way to make the ads go away lol 

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before i just paid immamac off, the browsing experience (even when logged in) was so insane on the phone, that my phone just shut down.  It is like imma signed up for the most utterly punitive ad experience possible.  flash shit was starting, layers of ads like a low-rent porn site.  constant reloading every 10 seconds.  completely insane.  probably the biggest fuck you to a community i can remember since katy agnor started doling out bans for posting that it was raining outside.

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8 minutes ago, Michael Knight said:

Why not put ads on the football board?

This is a UT sports board, not a politics board. If only there was an OP explaining this.  @sidis are you recommending that there be a cheaper than 3.50 option to get rid of just the CR ads? I can potentially get behind that.

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4 minutes ago, immamac said:

This is a UT sports board, not a politics board. If only there was an OP explaining this.  @sidis are you recommending that there be a cheaper than 3.50 option to get rid of just the CR ads? I can potentially get behind that.

i think you should do whatever the hell you want. it is your site.  i personally wish you would just make everyone pay to have a membership as the revenue model and keep everything clean but i have no idea if that's even remotely feasible relative to ad revenue.  all i'm saying is that the cr-ad experience was not just ads, it was fuck you ads that genuinely made things utterly unnavigable, much less readable.  it was the shittiest implementation of ads i have ever seen for a non-porn site.  pop ups, autoplay flash vids, forced reloads, layers, shit jumping all over the screen.  i get the extortion plan in conjunction with the ad revenue, but it seems to me just a touch of subtlety and restraint would have been warranted.  but again, i don't have any visibility behind the economics.

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16 minutes ago, immamac said:

This is a UT sports board, not a politics board. If only there was an OP explaining this.  @sidis are you recommending that there be a cheaper than 3.50 option to get rid of just the CR ads? I can potentially get behind that.

I mean all evidence to the contrary since a large amount of traffic by your own admission is politically driven and then you brag about how this is the largest political forum in Texas

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I have used the ad experience and you are greatly exaggerating especially when compared to any site that is completely free to use. If you think there will be a bunch of people who decide to leave the site which I know is based around the community and it's why I make threads like this, to have a conversation with the community about the changes, then IDK what to tell you. "go start your own site" has always been on the sign out front. I don't give a shit if you start a site that is super cloaked up all over the place and has no ads. That's not what this community wants, and there has been A LOT more vocal users about removing cloak room entirely than there have been people bitching about the "unusable ad experience" and the "fuck you to the community". 

I ask for pictures of what makes the site unusable and get nothing, can't fix what I don't know is fucked up. I test the experience on all modern devices and browsers and it is still very usable, it is definitely nowhere near as clean as an ad free experience and that's...kind of the point with ads...

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13 minutes ago, immamac said:

I have used the ad experience and you are greatly exaggerating especially when compared to any site that is completely free to use. If you think there will be a bunch of people who decide to leave the site which I know is based around the community and it's why I make threads like this, to have a conversation with the community about the changes, then IDK what to tell you. "go start your own site" has always been on the sign out front. I don't give a shit if you start a site that is super cloaked up all over the place and has no ads. That's not what this community wants, and there has been A LOT more vocal users about removing cloak room entirely than there have been people bitching about the "unusable ad experience" and the "fuck you to the community". 

I ask for pictures of what makes the site unusable and get nothing, can't fix what I don't know is fucked up. I test the experience on all modern devices and browsers and it is still very usable, it is definitely nowhere near as clean as an ad free experience and that's...kind of the point with ads...

The most vocal users seldom represent the majority, they're simply the loudest. You claim no one wants the cloak room yet its the 2nd most trafficked area of this site with nearly as many posts as the so called raison d'etre for this place. Sure sounds like its what this community wants. You're stated goal in the OP was to prevent traffic and drive people away from that board, which honestly makes no fucking sense but you run the site as you wish. And I hate to keep harping on this point but the daily texan is just as political as cr its just that those people's views happen to be in the minority now for some reason or another that no one can explain so theres alot fewer of them. Also those peoples go to is playing the victim so of course you're going to hear from them more. If you drive people away from posting their opinions on cr they'll just go to DT or to the eyes thread to do so or hell maybe they'll do it someplace else they're only so many times they can ask for chili recipes or talk about some dudes mom before it gets stale. 

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4 minutes ago, immamac said:

I have used the ad experience and you are greatly exaggerating especially when compared to any site that is completely free to use. If you think there will be a bunch of people who decide to leave the site which I know is based around the community and it's why I make threads like this, to have a conversation with the community about the changes, then IDK what to tell you. "go start your own site" has always been on the sign out front. I don't give a shit if you start a site that is super cloaked up all over the place and has no ads. That's not what this community wants, and there has been A LOT more vocal users about removing cloak room entirely than there have been people bitching about the "unusable ad experience" and the "fuck you to the community". 

I ask for pictures of what makes the site unusable and get nothing, can't fix what I don't know is fucked up. I test the experience on all modern devices and browsers and it is still very usable, it is definitely nowhere near as clean as an ad free experience and that's...kind of the point with ads...

if any of that is directed at me, then you are being unnecessarily defensive.  i never said anything about people leaving, etc...  i said do whatever you want...it is your site.  but you are engaging in extortion regardless and i was too busy trying to de-aids my devices to get a video. sorry. i have sent you screen capture videos before on issues with the site.  i am not exaggerating when i said it was the worst i have ever seen.  hopefully it is not as bad anymore...i recall you saying you were in the process of recalibrating and adjusting the experience after initially rolling it out.  hopefully it is better now for those people's sake

as for this...

4 minutes ago, immamac said:

there has been A LOT more vocal users about removing cloak room entirely than there have been people bitching about the "unusable ad experience" and the "fuck you to the community". 

why post shit like this?  is it supposed to be some sort of threat?  go for it.  do it.  see what happens next.  kill your golden goose for fuck's sake. just because all the republican dumbshits want to post stupid, veiled political garbage with impunity without being challenged and then crying "cr" when they do...that's probably not a good basis to undermine your top revenue generator.  can't wait to see how moderating the site with no dedicated place for politics goes for everyone when the market and data are telling you in no uncertain terms that it is the primary thing that people want to talk about on this site next to tom herman sucking...

talking out of both sides of your mouth...bragging about it being the largest political forum in texas and posting election results banners across the whole site while turning around and punishing that board for being successful and acting like you're going to kowtow to pussies that can't defend their arguments and just want to whine because...well, they're pussies seems...inconsistent.  

but again, to be clear, it is your site.  you should do as you see fit and what is best.  you said you create threads like these to have a conversation with the community about these things.  i tried to engage in that conversation and convey the experience i had.  what you do with that is totally up to you including dismissing it to the rubbish bin.

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When I browsed on mobile it was literal aids with obtrusive ads coming in from the sides to fisheye the site and constant popups. Maybe its gotten better. The pc version just has shit coming in from the bottom and cluttering up the middle

 

image.thumb.png.fd1d15ccf535fc71471ddd858bec58c0.png

 

 

edit and now this shit, dunno how that's considered usable but again you've stated that's your point. I won't complain about the ads if you do it to the entire site I don't understand why you thought it was a good idea to target a large portion of your users to satisfy a few loud voices

 

 

image.thumb.png.4202e50fe06a59d27b14a344e8658ca1.png

Edited by Michael Knight
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