I support advertizing as a way to get funding to the site, banners are ok and the amazon widget might actually be concidered a good thing for the users. Having participated in administration of similar web projects I understand how hard it is to balance the content and the ads so that they don't interfere too much with the actual usage of the site.
One thing I do criticize however is the new (?) feature that randomly changes key words in user posts as links to adveritizing sites and pop-ups. For example the word 'Sony' in this post might be randomly rendered as a link to a site with a Sony campaign, the word 'game' as a link to a site selling games, etc. I think this is a bit annoying, since it's tempering with the messages users themselves have posted to the site, making it look like they were the ones to post the adlinks in their own forum posts which is not the case.
It is fine to have links like this in content provided by the administration, but I feel that adding ads to forum posts written by average users (who are mostly totally unaware of such feature) is not ok. At least the usesr should be informed that this might happen.
EDIT - Nevermind, seems that I just had been infected by some adware. Sorry :D
Paid by the alliance
to slay all the giants.
