Hi All,

I've resisted doing this for a very long time, but sadly we're going to have to make some compromises with advertising on DiS' forums.

As I'm sure you're all aware, this rickety website has a lot wrong with it, and the site redesign has gone several £1000 over budget, due to unforeseen issues (but it was still £30k cheaper than what I was quoted by some companies). Most of the issues have been due to upgrading to a much better server to save costs, the irony of which is that for the next year or so we're no longer going to see the benefits of those savings.

The long and the short of it is that DiS, which is a free service and will always continue to be, is no longer able to say that we won't take any premium ad campaigns on the forums. However, we will now allow pop-overs, we won't have any drop-downs and we are going to cap these campaigns to 3 pages per user per day on all /community pages. In fact, you can probably just hit refresh 3 times to get rid of them. And I'm sure some of you who happily use the site with an ad-blocker will see very little difference.

I know some of you will have an issue with this due to page load times and safe-for-work-friendliness, but it will be capped, and I hope you understand. In theory, and to wildly extend the 'DiS is a bit like a nice pub' metaphor, I guess it's a bit like me asking you to bring your glasses back to the bar, so that I don't have to shut the pub due to not being able to afford to buy more glasses...

I've always wanted to keep the ads on the boards to a minimum, but due to the way in which the advertising has changed over the years, and how much random traffic DiS gets to things like the 'how much does Adele weigh', 'fish puns' and 'top 4 dub step' threads, we're trying to monetise some of that to ensure we can continue to run the site.

On the plus side, this does mean that we should have a little bit more money to work on fixing things- such as the mobile site which I hope we can make far better than it used to be - and for most of you, I doubt these few extra ads a day will make much difference.

Thank you for understanding,
Sean