'Twas easy to run Chrome (no ad block). I did not see Walmart or TP but saw absolutely no camera ads.
GearPatrol reminds me of In Living Color's Men on Films (and Football, Books, Art, Cooking, Fitness). The sketch was politically incorrect but hilarious.
I haven’t seen a single Ad. on Youtube, eBay or dpreview… or anywhere else for the last 20 years.
I use the Firefox extensions… NoScript
Maximum protection for your browser: NoScript allows active content only for trusted domains of your choice to prevent exploitation.
Version 11.4.24
Last updated June 2023
and… uBlock Origin
a Firefox extension that completely eliminates YouTube Ads
Version 1.50.0
Last updated June 2023
Ouch! Ads in the forum list, ads after three posts. Last visits were unsatisfactory anyways. I did not see it coming, but I might leave dpreview "just like that". Not a welcoming place anymore. Maybe I could contribute some nore here.
I'm seeing an ad in every thread after the op now 😵🥴
We're a friendly bunch of people here who play nicely together...................................................................................................most of the time 🤗
Its probably because of people like me ads exist. I'm always buying new things online, i mostly get amazon ads for product ranges I tend to use. since i've been getting into photography I get camera and lens ads too.
In about place of every fourth post or so. The new owner clearly has different opinions about a service, and I am not going to participate and get him money.
I would not mind large ads anywhere, money is needed. But there must be a line somewhere. DPreview certainly crossed that line. And that's just the begining. Just few days in. How about a month, a year....
Not what I witnessed already. Also after DPreviewd was saved, it seemed to me like I spotted some decline in topics and posts here, making the percentage of unfriendly posts larger, but it still is much better here. I truly hope this place stays.
Of course it was coming - DPR has to at some point turn a profit. Gear Patrol is not a charity and I seriously doubt that it as yet turned a profit. My router (eero) blocks adds. Or I should say the security service that Amazon provides by subscription does. Safari blocks ads and I have an independent and ad and tracker blocker on my system. I haven't seen an ad on DPR in several years and don't see any now. However, I expect the proliferation of good ad blockers has impacted ad revenue for most sites. Richard Butler complained on DPR a few years ago about people using ad blockers since ads was one way DPR generated revenue. But in general when I had my ad blockers off and ads did come through on DPR they were usually camera related. I could live with those, but totally irrelevant ads like TP or cucumbers from Walmart I sure could not live with. I expect Gear Patrol will work to push ads as it is a big source of revenue. The new DPR is not the same as the old. This type of ads is most likely just the start of changes we will see over there.
With ad blockers it is a cat and mouse game with the advertisers. Advertising companies such as doubleclick.com ( now owned by Google) analyze the current ad blockers and find ways to work around them. They will ether develop a bypass or will stop the full transfer to the website until the ad is displayed. The first is getting more difficult to do. However, the second method is frustrating as a system waits for an ad to display and will not move on. Once doubleclick or any of the others defeats the ad blockers, the ad blockers go to work to defeat the advertiser's code and smoothly block ads. The the cycle starts over.
I will say that in the past several days, I find that DPR takes longer to respond to download the page associated with a click on the site. It is visibly slower which can be aggravating. I suspect it has to do with the number of ads that DPR tries to down load that get blocked prior to downloading the info requested.
I look for Gear Patrol to be pretty proactive and aggressive to try to insure that anyone that wants to regularly use DPR to see ads. Stay tuned - it will be very interesting to see how Gear Patrol interacts with the traditional DPR audience.
I'm not really active on dpreview at the moment, but I take a peek from time to time and when I realized the change (I don't care much about ads, but the ones interrupting the sub-forum lists as well as the posts in a thread are very annoying to me, and that says something coming from someone who doesn't use adblock at all...) I was curious what people thought about that.
Someone in this thread (Ads in forums) mentioned that some were annoying and it probably isn't a good idea and then this was the reaction of a mod:
I found that very interesting. If that's true I guess the forum is in a lot of danger still, because I'm not sure this will change. I think a couple of people could be motivated to click on some ads or use some sponsored links to buy stuff, if it was an independent project, created by some of the dpreview staffers, struggling to survive, but for the operation Gear Patrol seems to be? I doubt anyone will change their habits. But we'll see.
I think regardless of what happens with the dpreview forum, this place should strive towards becoming something different and unique, instead of banking on the demise of the old place, like I've got the impression some alternatives are still attempting to do.
ive been back on DPR for not even 24 hours and its like useing a well designed ominos 3 DB on a 512k mac back in the 80s compared to Dbase on a IBM based machine. its heaven by comparrision.