Technical Support Forum

Greets,

To be clear and up-front, the membership agreement that everyone agreed to when signing up since the beginning of Writing.Com in the year 2000 states clearly that ad blockers are against the terms of service. Paid memberships of the Upgraded level and above are ad free. Rather than rely on ads to support their use, members can pay to use the site. All things considered, for the amount of time and resources some folks use surfing stories, the monthly cost is well less than most forms of entertainment.

The fact is this: Interactive stories are a large drain on Writing.Com and its resources. I've noted in another post that we're a small, family run site. We're not financed by big pockets and interactives are far from the primary purpose of the site and its community. Folks with ad blockers are just mooching off the rest of the site and the members who do pay and do view ads -- they're using server resources and not giving anything back.

While it may be a shocker to some people, large brand advertisers that actually spend money advertising online don't have much interest in having their content appear on the erotica, fan-fiction, "sonic" and other "odd" kinds of stuff that is found in the majority of interactives. It's a plus and minus thing. Since we are not "corporate", we can and do have a very open, very "free speech" policy on the content posted. As long as the content is rated correctly under our content rating system, we let folks write what they want. That, however, does not mean people are jumping up and down to put ads on that "stuff". They for sure are not. For that reason, we're very (very) limited in what ads can go there.

At this point, it is indeed as simple as this: If people don't like the interactives as they are, with an anti-adblocker system in-place, then we've just got to wish you the best of luck and bid you goodbye. Hopefully you'll find another site that's willing to house the content we've housed for over a decade at our own expense while people are paying nothing AND blocking the ads.

As for any ads housing viruses or malware -- we are absolutely *not* down with that. It's not intended and it's not something we find acceptable either. If and when we find it or them, the ad network(s) providing such junk will be removed. To date I have not personally encountered any of these while viewing interactives with a free account and no, we can not just turn off all the ads because someone in the rotation is providing a bad one. It has to be tracked down and manually eliminated.

Best,
~~SM




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