@auron, konnichiwa: just let it go. you guys sound like a broken record. and in konnichiwas case, it really has started to get annoying.

@RealMafo: He ois trying to find a new revenue stream, which is the amazon store. if enough people buy there, he will reduce the ads. thats what ioi said. so stop bitching and start shopping. Kart still empty?

@ioi: I hope you can turn this into your full time job. and I hope you can make those rumored 20-30k each month at some point in the future. Cause entrepreneurship, vision and effort should be valued.

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