Taluntain said:
Something possibly worth considering would be Skimlinks or Skimwords... Skimwords for unregistered visitors only. That's the advertising that makes random words into advertisement links. Skimlinks only automatically converts various links posted on the forum to sites like Amazon, Newegg, etc. into referral links.
From what I've seen/read Skimwords is pretty controversial as it looks like someone made a link in their own post.
The main reason why I use adblock is that most of normal ads tend to be intrusive, use psychomanipulation techniques or slow down my comp. My general policy when it comes to ads is:
If it moves, contains erotic content (like most of MMO ads), shit like "You won!", slows down my computer, etc. it gets blocked.
One interesting thing that I saw is a system that highlights certain worlds in post and hovering above them displays a text ad. It wasn't as intrusive as most of graphical ads and it was obvious that it's an ad. I don't remember where I saw it and what was its name, though.
One nice thing that could be done would be adding different degrees of patronage with different tags and maybe stuff like custom avatars, etc. to encourage donating 15$ multiple times during year when someone can afford to do so.
One thing that I find problematic about the disabled search is lack of ability to search user's posts/threads. I liked to browse posts of old users like Rosh that way.
Azrael the cat said:
See here's the thing. It's called GD, and yeah they and I got that it's for posting about stuff other than crpgs. I even said how a place to do that can be kind of nice. The trouble is that this is still the RPG-fucking-codex, not the I-got-banned-from-everywhere-else-and-no-one-on-the-net-will-be-friends-with-me-so-I'll-post-here-Codex. I've got no problem with having a GD place for rpg fans who post in the rpg sections as well. But if the 'dex is sinking because of those fuckwits, who are here purely because they can't find anyone else who will pretend to listen to them, with no fucking interest in gaming at all, then fuck them. Why should we let ourselves sink due to fuckers who (a) are part of the gaming decline, or (b) aren't into gaming at all.
That would be Sub and Liberal. Sub is new and Liberal has an alt that posts in gaming discussions. And people who are the part of decline are spamming RPGD with threads about the new shit. Fans of pre-decline cRPGs have very few reasons to post in RPGD and Workshop nowadays. Not only new undeclined cRPGs are very rare but also most of sensible discussion about RPG design already was done to death and is listed in the Project Monkey thread.
Azrael the cat said:
I posted this as a joke, and an impulsive/stupid joke at that, a couple of weeks back, but if folks really want to dump GD then I'd actually suggest this seriously: make it so that your proportion of posts in rpg discussion/workshop must outweigh the % of your posts in GD, while enforcing rules on forum-relevance (random checks and bans, or just occasionally checking suspicious posters, if it can't be automated). Keep GD as a minor side-forum for off-topic posts amongst folk who are mainly here for the rpgs.
So, what exactly would we debate on the RPG forums? "BG is shit thread part 234"? "Food in RPGs part 27?" "Arcanum has shit combat thread part 1458?".
One thing that could be done with those who spam GD would be adopting a donate or GTFO policy for them.