I’m still in the process of editing the site, and the first thing I’ve decided to change is the width of the posts. This is something I’ve been considering since the alpha because of how narrow the forums are. The problem is the old theme had a fixed size of 545px. Every picture, video, and the like was assigned this specific width, which would be fine if the text and tables were fixed also.
Basically what this means is that I’m going to have to go to every single post and remove the “545” width and “310” height tags, as well as go to every youtube video and embed them with a specific width of 670 x 376 (just adding the link doesn’t seem to make them full size). Still it’s worth it not to have narrow-ass forums.
Authors and Subscribers
Originally, the plan was to turn all subscribers into authors. Unfortunately, about half an hour after this was posted, one of the bot subscribers, “TatianaDallas” posted some article about maggots. Just bizarre.
I’m going to have to leave people as subscribers until I can confirm with absolute certainty that you’re human. Then I’ll give you the keys to kingdom. Trolls and vandals are fine and just part of the deal, but robots I cannot abide.
Casting Call
I decided the best place to put the new scripts are up in the corner as opposed to the left sidebar. It was getting a little too cluttered on the left and the right sidebar is awful for anything save media. You’ll notice there’s open roles, long term roles, as well as an option to create user scripts of your own and collaborate.
Advertising
The last thing I’ve been testing is the new advertising. I decided to stick with the same placement to try and get an apples to apples comparison. Of course, with WordAds, not only do you get paid per impression, there’s some entertaining commercials and the host itself is free.
While it’s apparent that Google Adsense has a wider variety of ads, and some even gaming related, there aren’t as many videos and the revenue appears to be dependent on clicks. It seems this website will be much more expensive when you account for both cost and revenue.
Au revoir, sweet, sweet cash, I hardly knew ye. Still, if the choice is between some extra beer money for me and a better experience for the mod users, then I’ll take the latter every time. In the meantime, I’ll still be running the Google Ads in an attempt to break even. Hopefully they’re not completely hopeless.
You hear me Google, step it up you dorks.
