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tikatuWhen I went on the site today, I noticed that the ads, which I thought I'd banished with their Adblocker yesterday, were back. I activated their Adblocker again, and found out you can no longer get rid of them for three days at a time. Now it's down to just one day.
Do you think this little fact is on the homepage?
Nope. Not there. I think they don't want people to notice--though their customer base will realize the change soon enough.
It used to be that you could get a paid account at ff.net. I had one. For less than $20 a year, I had several perks (like traffic stats) and an Adblocker which worked for 30 days. Not just three, and certainly not a measly one. Then, little by little, the paid for perks were whittled away and offered to all and sundry. The paid for account became less and less appealing, then they dropped it entirely.
This just had to happen when I've been getting really irked by livejournal's interstitial ads. I have a plus account (I think that's what they call it), and while I don't mind the banner ads so much (after all, I knew they were going to be there when I signed up for this type of account), the interstitials take up the whole page and usually involve both video and sound. This can sometimes take my touchy sound card down. They also don't always disappear after you click on the "X". The picture might, but the sound remains. Whether or not this is a technical glitch, I'm not sure, but it's certainly a PITA.
If Fanfiction.net wasn't such a central, easy-to-use archive, and the main archive of my fandom, I'd probably not use it at all. I have most of my fics archived at both Lunaescence and FanNation, neither of which have these annoying ads. (I don't consider lj to be fanfic friendly; the only things I've posted here have been on drabble communities.) I'm beginning to wonder if I should post any new stuff at one of the other places and link to my ff.net profile.
It might be a good thing for fanfiction.net to perhaps offer a paid subscription again--if they can come up with some perks that would make it worthwhile. It certainly could help their bottom line, and let the rest of the site go back to a three-day holiday from ads, instead of just one. The way things are going, though, their little Adblocker comment is becoming less and less true. Pretty soon, they'll be giving up that "compromise between showing ads to offset operating costs and crossing the line to the point of annoying our users." In fact. they might already have.
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 02:19 pm (UTC)Hey there!
I don't know if you've come across the Archive of Our Own (http://archiveofourown.org/), but it's another option for anyone who wants to host their fic and/or read at a multi-fandom Archive. It's run by the Organization for Transformative Works (http://transformativeworks.org/) which is a fan-run non-profit. The org owns the servers, which means they're much less vulnerable to commercial pressures, etc, than many other sites, and it is not ad-supported.
You may already know about the AO3 and have decided it's not for you, but I thought I'd drop a comment just in case. It's a newish Archive, and currently in open beta (you have to sign up for an invitation to join, although the queue is currently less than two days wait time). This means that some things are still being developed, but also that there's lots of potential for asking for cool new things and getting them.
(Full disclosure, I'm chair of the Accessibility, Design and Technology committee, which oversees the development of the Archive. I'm definitely not wanting to be all 'OMG you should join OUR Archive - although naturally I think it's pretty damn cool - but I thought you might like to know it existed!)
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Date: 2010-04-01 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 04:26 pm (UTC)I hadn't come across fannation before! I love that fandom is always working to propagate itself in all sorts of different ways and places.
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Date: 2010-04-01 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 03:05 pm (UTC)I only visit ff.net with my Adblock Plus on, which works nicely - no ads for me. On the other hand, I think ff.net has become virtually unusable if you don't use some kind of adblocker - the ads are just everywhere, constantly AND they're very intrusive. Sometimes, I really wonder why so many people still post there - it's not like there are no alternatives (I tend to pimp out my personal alternative, http://www.skyehawke.com whenever I can, because I think it's a much nicer place *g*). I guess it's a snake biting its own tail. People post there, because everyone else is posting there and they believe it's a must-be place. If only a handful of people take the choice to go away, nothing will ever break ff.net's rule.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 03:27 pm (UTC)The ads at ff.net are very intrusive. I just cleaned out my history. When I went to the site and tried to activate the adblocker for the day, a full-page ad popped up... which stopped me until they'd decided I'd seen enough of the ad and let me skip it.
I know that their policy about adblocking came about in response to FanLib, but they're quickly becoming worse than that site ever was.
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Date: 2010-04-01 04:12 pm (UTC)If you're running Firefox, try the Adblock Plus plugin. It's really working wonders for me (though, occasionally, it cuts away important links).
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Date: 2010-04-01 09:12 pm (UTC)It's true that reviewing could always be better, no matter what the fandom or archive. Unfortunately, I've found that for the smaller (or older) fandoms, ff.net is probably the place where they'll get a larger audience and more drive-by reviews.
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Date: 2010-04-01 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-03 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-03 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-06 08:11 am (UTC)