Beginning to test Amazon ads this weekend.
 

I'm going to push out some Amazon ads this weekend. It will be a skyscraper format on the right side of the pages. If you're on the page for Predator, there will be ads for the Predator DVD, Blu-Ray, Toys, etc. on the right side of the page.

The format isn't final - and the matching engine isn't perfect... which should lead to some amusing ads. We'll see how it goes over the next week.

Best,
bunni

Tell me, why are we advertising on our pages?

Funding for the site most likely

Uh, how old are you again? :confused: Do you not understand that a website of this magnitude costs serious money to maintain and selling Ad space is the only way to keep going, OTHER than charging members $$ to be here. For one, I am glad it's not costing me to be a MOD :eek:

15 years old, or 7,884 minutes old.

Advertising is a necessary evil.

I hate consumer culture.

Then you hate America.

Pretty much.

I have bills to pay. The site runs ~$1,000 per month in expenses and that number is always growing. Advertising has never covered the costs - I have always run this site at a personal expense to myself.

Yesh. That's a lot of money for a site like this. Think we should start a donation fund?

I appreciate the sentiment but totally not necessary. I'd much rather implement some advertising than harass the membership for money. God Bless America. ;)

What are you, some kind of communist? This isn't PBS.

Offer to help with expenses isn't Communist! Mister Moustache! ;) Communist would be FORCING the membership to give 10% of their household income to Bunni. Now considering how many members are kids with no jobs (well, no income is a better word) that concept would not be clear to them.

A large part of that is people CRAMMING the servers full of crap that the site doesn't need.

My suggestions to help with this:

1) Continue the policy of limiting screenshots. We don't need 36 screenshots of one gun (I've talked to Kin93 about this already).

2) We are pretty good now at policing guys who put up PNGs. Ben41 has been especially good about warning new members about this. I once deleted PNGs which were 2.57 Megabytes just for ONE PICTURE!!!!! But a lot of them are just 700K-1.4 MB, which is STILL TOO MUCH.

3) I am still against people putting up endless pages of stuff which are of questionable use' to anyone wishing to use IMFDB as a research resource.

4) Start DELETING crap on your talk pages that are old business. You can keep memorable quotes or conversations. But questions back and forth that are ultimately settled. Why keep them? I'm gonna start editing all my OWN stuff that that is just dead weight on Bunni's servers.

5) We do have a rule against members mass deleting any conversation or discussion that is not created solely by them, but us MODS should start cleaning things up. I see tons of discussions on discussion pages about questions or mysteries that are eventually "cleared up" and are no longer relevant, so we can either clear the discussion page or delete it entirely until someone has something new to say.

Again, I wrote too much again, but heck. I am procastinating from cleaning guns... :(

MPM is right...is there any way we can remove .PNG from the list of acceptable upload formats, so that anyone who even tries to upload a .PNG won't be able to do so?

And point taken on the Talk Page; I'll go back and clean out mine at some point. Mine is already huge.

Last but not least, is there a way to purge the entire server of unused files? I think I asked about this before, but we haven't gotten a response.

Actually we should manually check. Once a while ago, I know someone replaced MY pics with their own gun pics (not overwritten but used their own file names) and if we did a mass purge at that moment, I would have lost my pics. When I did a manual check I noticed that my pics were not being used, so I checked the actual gun pages and some crap 'jacked' image was taking its place. Doh! I fixed that back, but a mass delete would have create problems.

At any moment of time, there may be FILES listed as unused which should NOT be. Also any files used in threads on the forum are not listed as used on IMFDB when they are being used to illustrate points in the forums.

I'm confused, what do you mean by some of your pics not being used? Theyd don't show up on your user page?

Sometimes I slip and don't list them (by accident). Ya know! Sometimes I upload these after a long day on the set ... in the middle of the night! ;)

And yes, these pics were not on any page. I'm just saying in that one instance (months and months ago), a mass delete would have screwed me :D

Also consider THIS scenario. It's late. You've just uploaded a BUNCH of screencaps, but you decide to go to sleep and wait until the next free moment you have to formally build your movie page.

An AUTO DELETE scheduled time comes and WHOOOSH. Everything you just spent hours doing is automatically deleted, because you didn't immediately put it on your movie page right after you uploaded it.

I've done this. I've accidentally deleted what I thought was a dead file and got a private message "Hey! Why did you delete that file, I was going to put it on the page, but you beat me to the punch". Doh! I had to apologize and restore the file, also feeling a bit like a jerk. :rolleyes:

Now imagine a program doing that automatically en masse. :eek:

Hey, just because I'm Chinese, and born and raised in Chicago, doesn't make me a Communist.



And thanks for reminding me MPM. I need to delete the old talk sections on my talk page.

Let's have Ten Nugent donate a shitload of money to us.

Well, for one thing, the Modern Warfare 2 discussion page could be trimmed down. It's quite large with a lot of old pre-release discussion on it.

I was also thinking a good way to trim down the video game section might be to appoint some trustworthy editors as temporary admins and give each one a letter category to do (e.g., admin 1 cleans out A section, admin 2 cleans out B section, etc..).

Recently I've deleted all the talk sections on my talk pages because all of the discussions are over.

Can I go around and delete evertything I said so people will finally shut the hell up about it?

It's not the extra files sitting on the servers that are an issue, storage is cheap. It's the shear number of pageviews we're pushing out and the number of images that are on each page. I'd rather pony up for better hardware than limit page size though - I never want to make the content worse.

Also deleting talk pages etc doesn't actually make the database smaller, as mediawiki still saves all that so we can revert back to it if ever necessary. It would help readability of the talk pages though. The text database is actually relatively small - it's all the images that soak up the storage space.

Large PNGs do kill the pages however. They're slow to load and suck up a ton of bandwidth. The ironic thing about PNG is that at the same file size PNG is clearer than JPG with fewer compression artifacts... but the configuration to get that doesn't seem to be intuitive for people.

Ah thanks! Bunni. But when we do a mass backup, which we do a lot, doesn't the smaller talk pages for each backup have the cumulative effect of less data to store?

I just hope we don't start replacing my high res gun pics with low res google pics! DOH! ;)

And good thing Bunni missed my comment about everyone donating 10% of their household income to him...... ;)

Regarding Talk pages: Even if it doesn't save much space on the server (and even if server space isn't of much relevance), it's still nice to clean them up. I couldn't even check my Talk page on my phone because it was so huge. I deleted all content from earlier than January 1, 2010 and now I can actually check the updates when I'm away from my laptop.

Ah, I understand. I can't exactly relate, because I always put images that I upload onto pages immediately after I upload them. What you are saying makes sense. That being said, I wish there were a way to make deleting unused files in bulk easier (even if it's not just a simple purge). But I also admit that I have no idea how we would do that. :D

My job doesn't even pay that well

I don't even have a damn job. I guess I can send it 10% of nothing

I'm already sending 100%.

And I can't thank you enough. :D

I'm bumping this thread to let you guys know you'll begin seeing amazon ads on some pages over the next week or so. Let me know if you run into formatting/display issues so I can have them corrected.

It's kinda weird looking. Right now the banner is on the right side and really screwing with my page format (as I view it). I know it's a fluid situation, but perhaps a horizontal banner on the very top? Again it may take some tweaking to make it smooth, but right now it's clunky.

Same for me. The right-side ads are condensing the actual IMFDB pages, which makes the text and image alignment all messed up.

Since I see that the ads generally relate to whatever page I'm on (i.e. if I pull up the "GoldenEye" page, I'll get a link to buy "GoldenEye" on Amazon), is it possible we could do something where they display on the page itself? Maybe beneath the movie poster or something?

Thanks guys - working on it. It's going to take a few days to work all the bugs out.

I use Firefox with adblock and I couldn't see the ads. The other day adblock updated, and now I can see the ads. :confused:

Oh good they must have received my email about you.

It's now set so the main content is 1000px wide, this should be wide enough for all of the existing pages on the site. You may not see consistent page layouts for a few days as the cache is flushed out and updated.