That add which just gives you a completely black screen over all the text is rediculously badly programmed, I did just have to get adblock going again on this site. I love supporting the place but that ad literally stops me being able to read any of the articles from the front page.

The forum takes up a lot of bandwidth tho, and that does take money to survive. Think about what you are saying yourself, the sales chartz earn cash for the site from some pretty big groups who use them, that has nothing to do with the Forums, if they're costing ioi cash and not giving anything back then there is no reason for them to be there taking from the income of the chartz side of the site.

I am using Adblock, you must of misread my comment.

Ok, let me reword the first sentence.

All you would be doing by putting up with it is supporting bulls**t advertising.

My point is dont feel guilty =P

Forums dont take a lot of bandwidth because its basically all HTML. Any data heavy content like pics and vids are linked to external sites, so companies like youtube and games publisher sites pay for the bandwidth for that content (and they get their money back when the promotion leads to sales).

Ofcourse it would cost some money to run a forum, but not a significant amount at all.

I understand that they are doing nothing wrong by trying to make money from advertising, but theres also nothing wrong to block those ads if you dont want them, because if everyone in the world had adblock, sites like this would still exist because they are based on user generated content. In the worst case situation, you wouldnt be reading any more of their articles, but ten thousand other people on the internet would still be writing a lot of good stuff on the same topic... for free.

This site is awful when viewing on a phone. The ads are so annoying and I can't skip or get rid of them.

I had to re-enable adblock on this site, a while back. The site kept stalling firefox on me. I don't know who the hell deals with the ads. But I'm not gonna support this horrible setup.

There are some exceptions to things linked on this forum which do take up a massive amount of bandwidth, while the rules on forum sigs are at 1.5mb max since those are uploaded to the site there is no hard limit applied by the forums software it is all handled by moderators here. That means that if some gimp comes along and decides the world should see some 30-40mb gif of a shiny part of a movie they love stuck into their sig then every single user who loads up a page which features a post from that user is going to take that amount of bandwidth directly from gamrconnects webserver, considering that even unsuccessful threads on here get 100+ views  others like this weeks charts already reaching several thousand views think of that number of people X 30mb. I know browsers will obviously cache that so the number isn't exactly going to be the exact extent I suggest here, but it's still a lot of bandwidth, and that isn't free.

You mention that sites like this would exist because the content on them is created by the users is free.... That is the equivilent of sitting on your own deck chair on a train and suggesting you don't need to pay the fare because it's your own chair.

Edit - Hmmm the sigs are actually not stored on the gamrconnect site only the sig images are, some of which are still moderately large but still moderately large x thousands of views = bandwidth.