Quick survey: Do you see obnoxious livejournal ads?

[mattbell]

Hi all,

I've received several reports that people have to look at obnoxious ads when reading this blog or posting comments.

I don't see any ads.  I don't know if that's a function of me having a paid account or of firefox's foxy ad blocker.  However, the idea of me paying $25 a year to host a blog that's serving fullscreen ads to people who look at it just seems wrong.  

So please let me know if you see ads and whether you have no account, a free account, or a paid account. 

If this is annoying enough people, it might be time to finally move over to wordpress for public posting. 

Comments

[danaoshee.livejournal.com]

I believe it depends on what type of account you're viewing from - I started having to randomly view ads after my paid account expired.
I just hit refresh if an ad comes up, though, and since it's random, it then goes away.

[shandrew.livejournal.com]

No advertising should appear while viewing any paid account's entries:
http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=262
(though that isn't 100% clear for plus accounts)

Paid accounts should not see any ads on LJ, ever, and that's been my experience (aside from when i get logged out).

Wordpress.com will also stick ads on some entries unless you pay extra for no ads.

[sarcazm.livejournal.com]

i have a paid account so i see no ads.

[sarcazm.livejournal.com]

also, fyi, if you relocated your blog, as many of my friends have done, and then set it up to feed through to lj, lj users still have to go to the other blog site to comment, and conversations there are difficult to manage on many other sites, and so most of my friends who have tried this have ended up coming back to lj in the end.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

It looks like there is an automatic crossposter that will handle crossposting comments, so the lj comments on public posts will show up in wordpress and vice versa. Going to test it out now.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

AFAIK, the only time you see ads is if a) you (the viewer) view without logging in, or b) if you (the poster) gets a plus account.

Wordpress has that obnoxious lack of thread tracking, though, forcing comment posters to refer to the sequential comment post number. Really, nested comments have been around for, what, twenty years? Why is this tech not universal?

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

No nested comments on WP? Lame. Lack of nesting is one of many reasons I don't like facebook as a blogging medium.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

To be fair to WP, they may have that feature. I've just never seen it in any blog hosted by WP. Ever.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Looks like nested comments work in most WP themes these days.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Really!?! I wonder why so many of the WP blogs I've read don't bother turning this feature on. It seems like the ultimate no-brainer to me.

[serolynne.livejournal.com]

Many WP themes support nested threads - but it is not a default on many of them. Ours does, but it's not nearly as robust or reliable as LJs. For instance, you can't subscribe to a thread. There may be plug-ins for that, but I haven't gone too deep with it.

I also don't like WP for social blogging - it just doesn't work that way. Many of your posts would be ideal for a WP hosted blog. Your projects, travels, adventures, interesting tidbits & research you've done. However, I think you'd find that you would miss the social aspect for some topics where you want a conversation between yourself, your readers and between them. WP just doesn't hack it for that - there's no real concept of a user profile, or linking/friending readers together. It's basically more like a public interaction between you - the blogger, and each reader. (Of course, that doesn't mean some responders don't respond to each other.. it's just much more difficult to track that way).

For me, I'm still working on defining the distinctions of what goes where.

[ferrouswheel.livejournal.com]

I suggest adding the disqus plugin if you use Wordpress. Deals with the difficulty of threaded comments, spam, accounts, rating them etc.

http://disqus.com/overview/

[madbard.livejournal.com]

>However, the idea of me paying $25 a year to host a blog that's serving fullscreen ads to people who look at it just seems wrong.

Why? The only alternatives seem to be removal of free accounts, or your paying more.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

I'd pay more to give other people a better experience on my blog.

[madbard.livejournal.com]

By "your" I mean everyone's. :) I'm not sure LJ would be financially viable if paid users were charged $50 and free users saw no ads. There would be very little incentive to be a paid user, since the alternative would be almost the same and now significantly cheaper.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

No, I just want them to not see ads then they look at paid users' blogs. LJ could still serve ads on their friends page and when they post.

[madbard.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. So you'd like your to-the-world web presence not to be ad-festooned.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Yes, I want an immediate de-festooning. :-)

[madbard.livejournal.com]

I use WordPress for my professional site and blog. It's fine for one-way communications, though not as great if you want dialogue with your readers.

[djdigit.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've seen any ads (paid account).

[ravendisplayed.livejournal.com]

I don't see ads. I have had a paid account in the past, but it is currently lapsed. I do run ad blockers, so that may or may not be it.

[valdelane.livejournal.com]

I occasionally get a pop-over ad even while logged in as a paid user. I'm told it's not /supposed/ to happen, but that doesn't make me any happier about it.

Ho-Ly-Crap

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I just tried to view a friend's journal. He's new to LJ, so I really haven't been to his site, just reviewing his posts on my flists.

I couldn't even see his site except as a distant watermark until some freaking ad movie loaded and played. I have a free account and have never bothered to upgrade; I gather these have been discontinued. Really, if that's to be the level of intrusion LJ decides must be the norm, the plus accounts have been made unusable by any reasonable and thinking person.

I share your level of frustration and fear for LJ's continued viability. This sucks.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

I don't see ads, and I've never had a paid account. (This is a standard free account, whatever that is, and a rather old one from well before plus accounts existed.) I also run Firefox with NoScript, so I don't see a lot of irritating ads in general.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I see ads sometimes. I have no idea if I ever have on your account.

[mhat.livejournal.com]

Annoyingly I get gigantic ads every time I login. How awesome is that.

[dixiemouse.livejournal.com]

there was an update LJ sent out awhile back (one of the few I skimmed over) that said something about free and plus accounts would get them, then only way to not get them was if you were a paid account... I get them everytime I log in, and sometimes when reading and it never fails to bork things up (if I let the thing run, the links don't work, so I have to refresh the page to navigate anywhere) so, I just refresh when they start up... what irritates me is when they pop up when I am posting, because it regularly borks the post... good times.

[eccentrific.livejournal.com]

I see no ads if I go to nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com
(no ad blockers, no paid account)
I do see ads if I view the journal embedded in another page

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I never see ads when I log in, which is almost always.

I only noticed an ad for the first time earlier this year (or maybe last year?) and mentioned it to someone, and then they informed me that unpaid users see ads a lot, and it's been that way for a long time. I'm pretty sure I saw it because I had not logged in and was viewing it from a computer I don't usually use.