Thought that I would check and see if what we all suspected was true. It is.
A comparison of OSO and Freaks from the last three months:

OSO:
Page Views down 27%
Traffic Rank down 22,766

Freaks:
Page Views up 78%
Traffic Rank up 181,566

Source: Alexa

Prediction: IB buys Freaks within 6 months and moves it to the slow server so that there is no difference. :D

If prior and present performance is any indicator, IB doesn't give a $hit. They're absentee landlords.

BTW- every banner ad on here is invisible to me. So many of us missing the existence of the Google ads is pretty strong evidence that I'm not in the minority.

What's that other site with out the pop ups ...Boat freaks?

No GOOG adds on my screen. But I rather have OSO double or tripple my fee to get rid of all the freeloafer in here with their idiotic comments. Free for a week or two then pay up or shut up.

The ads are on the left side of my screen for "Top 25 stock picks by Google" which isn't that major an issue. I never noticed until now.

BUT is the members E-Mail list safe??? Will it be sold and all umteen thousand of us get bombarded with spam and junk e-mail?:food-smiley-007:

LMAO!!!!!!!:evilb::rolleyes:

i asked that question months ago , got sent to the cellar:party-smiley-004:

.org :cool:

naaah. won't happen. I don't think it's about the money over there. TJ's dad founded the site with the intent that it always be free. I don't think that fits the IB business model. :cool:

Can we get a breakdown of how much of that is MarylandMark??? :evilb:

were back in the cellar again , were back (my best steven tyler voice:drink:):evilb::party-smiley-004::grinser010:

Why was this moved??

I'll pitch in for all of OSO members to buy back the site..

That would be shown in the 6 month numbers. I just showed the 3 month numbers. :D

Check out any site.

www.alexa.com

So that nobody would see it, yet nobody could complain that it got poofed.

That sounds good at first. I thought to myself, hey self: for a little more than the price of a VIP membership we could all be owners. But that's how it starts at first. You buy one website. That was fun. But then you can't stop, and soon you are checking out which forums are real movers and which ones have the traffic numbers to support some serious google ad revenue. Pretty soon you are grabbing the little forums before they get too big. 112 members since last year? Grab it!!

Then one morning, before you even have coffee you have acquired "NewPuppies.com" and "BegoniaGrower.org" and by the end of the day you have spent 11 million dollars on every forum in the english language and then in a binge of buying and owning it hits you: the Chinese. They now have more users than the US. Traffic!!! Must buy Chinese forums. Must have traffic.
And you are up late.... up much later than you should be.... borrowing money from your in-laws to buy forums in Chinese that you can't even read and it gets better: on subjects that you have no interest in whatsoever. It could happen. It happened to Roger. ;)

Genius marketing that "offshore" in the google add bar is completely irrelevant to this Offshore . . . just brilliant :rolleyes:



tell ya the truth i hadnt even niticed it was there till you said something

TBD =typical business deal. Idiots, thieves, politicians, and general jerks are n charge of everything. :angry-smiley-038:

Is anyone getting the bars of ad's when you click on a link that stretch out top to bottom before the screen finally comes up with the first post on the page?

Yes. Just started noticing it today. That's what I thought this thread was actually about. I couldn't care less about the Google ads.

The ads filling the page before the page sets up is a little annoying. :(

Dang it.. there it is. "
Ads by GooglePerformance Boats Online
Offshore videos and shop tours Cigarette, Fountain, Outerlimits...
os. performanceboats. comFreeman Eckley/Edgewater
Unsinkable Offshore Powerboats Exceptional boats and service
www. Freeman-Eckley. com"

That was on the top. Didn't see it before. Normaly I scrowl down to fast, but now the adds are on the left also.

Fund.. You'r funny.. but probobly right.

All 3 of my puters have been loading pages really strangely since yesterday. Full page of OSO sponsor adds with the actual thread being compressed to the right side of the screen. Dam annoying that. At first I thought my kid screwed with my settings but all 3 puters are doind it. WTF?

The forum sections open normally but click a thread and it all gets skewed.

Not to worry, someone will respond to our questions/complaints shortly :D :D :rolleyes: :Whatever:

We are currently using an new advertising service to deliver our ads. This service offers many benefits over the old method. However, we are well aware of the issues the community has with the way the pages load and are working with the new service to find a way to resolve these issues. We hope to find a solution that benefits and pleases everyone involved with this great community and hope that you give us some time to examine all of our options.

If you were concerned, you would cease using the service until the technical issue was resolved, rather than aggravating your audience & customers..

anything at all being done about this? mine is loading the same way, flashing the sidebar adds full screen than compressing to the left margin. Its terribly annoying.

OH YA Dave, they are working on it. NOT. Still screwey. Nothing has changed at all. Well, thats not true. Now its slow and screwey.

HEY IB/ Strormy Bot. You ever gonna fix this friggin forum?

We are constantly working with our advertisers to see how we can improve ad delivery. The simple explanation is that the ads to the left are being delivered from a separate advertising server so it does take a split second to load. While not a great impact on the viewing of this forum, we are aware of your concerns and take them very seriously. If a change is planned for the ads delivery, we will definitely be sure to let you know. We want your experience here to be as enjoyable as possible and we apologize for the recent issues.

Ok, we did a little tweak that may improve the way the ads load on the page. Again, we are looking for more long term solutions, but this may help.

With all due respect...

-You should have done your due-diligence on the new vendor a bit better

-You should have done some parallel testing instead of doing it live

-How hard would it be to give us a heads-up on these things? Or maybe respond within the first half-dozed "OSO- pull your heads out of your a$$es" threads

You've given us the distinct impression over the last couple months that you don't give a flying F about us- and we're beginning to adopt the same attitude towards you.

You fed us Beenish on day-one and because of your f.uckups, she got devoured. Then we got one of your managers- for an entire one post. Thanks for the corporate happy-talk, but where are you now? Who's in charge?

I am sorry you feel that way. We use this ad system on most of our sites and because of the nature of the way remote advertising works, this is how the ads load. We can only work to globally improve on how we interact with the service across all of our sites. We care a lot about all of our sites and welcome feedback and input from the communities we manage. We are aware that there have been some issues that have frustrated some members, but we take each complaint very seriously.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that these are your feelings and attitudes. Unfortunately they've not been represented by any of IB's actions.

As far as taking any of us seriously, everytime there's an issue, it gets buried in the "forum usage issues" section... at the bottom of the page. Until recently, any questioning of "OZ" was met with instant thread deletion. More to the point- individually, I have never received so much as a reply to any of my forum speed/failure questions.

This didn't just start in the last few days- since the server migration, visits here have not once been satisfactory. They've crept and creaked along, reminiscent of the 14.4K days.

Lastly, if you had any familiarity with the "usual" user names on this site, you may be astonished to visit a site like Boatfreaks.org and see how many are duplicated over there- with signup dates in the last 90 days.

As you might guess, many of us are quite passionate about our hobby and OUR community. We pretty much like each other and value each other's knowledge- and we share all of that here. But, there's nothing unique about this place- aside from "us". We'd all prefer to stay here, but if the trends are indicative of the attitudes among many members, they're finding new places to congregate. It doesn't have to be that way.

You only own the site. We own the community.

I understand your frustration and 100% respect your passion. We understand that there are many other places you could go to discuss your passion. We really do not want that. Not just me, but all of Internet Brands. We are just as frustrated as you are about the issues that you are experiencing. When our communities get frustrated, we get frustrated as well. While there is a business side to how we do things, we want to make this the best environment we possibly can for all of you because without the community, there would be no business. There are many forums out there. But we understand that communities are what make a site like OSO so great.

Then let me share two pieces of helpful information with you. If you can do these two simple things, all our lives will be more pleasant.

1. Communicate.
Tell us what's going on. We can be very patient if we're part of the process- or at least have an expectation of service issues and interruptions.

2. Do what you say.
Don't tell us things that you can't do. If you say them, do them. If you repeatedly over-estimate, we can only assume one of two things- you're either incompetent or a liar.

The idea is to make the little squiggly line go UP over time. Making it go DOWN over time is called killing a business.

The new owners have succeeded in decreasing the number of unique page views by 37% in three months.

The bright side is, we now have access to wonderful new products and services brought to us by Google Ads. It really is a better "environment."