Important note about City of Heroes wikis

They've recently taken to having ads on their site, too, so, not surprising.

System32 isn't a good place for my music collection, then?

To keep PW add free is a good enough reason I have donated to their running costs, and will do so again in the future.

Check the left column on the front page.

Actually, I've received several donations recently (and not so recently) and I've been grossly remiss in sending thank-you notes and update the Site Support Ledger page (which I make public so that NCsoft knows that it's not a commercial site). I'll try to sit down and write the thank-yous and update the ledger tonight. I can't emphasize how much I appreciate those donations, they really help in defraying the hosting costs. I'm hoping that in addition to a thank-you note, I'll be able to show my appreciation to the community a little more tangibly in the near future, but I digress.

It's kind of funny, though. When we left Wikia, their attitude was pretty much, "I know that you think you're going to make a ton of money on the site by hosting the advertising yourself, but we assure you that it's not that easy. You'll barely make a pittance."

I kept telling them, "I'm not in this for the money. In fact, I'm willing to pay to have this resource available in a non-obtrusive manner." I don't know if they just didn't believe me or if they couldn't wrap their brain around the concept of the Paragon Wiki being a community project, not a business.

At any rate, I can honestly say that we have never regretted the decision to re-host the site ourselves.

That reminds me. Tax season and some free cash...


Well, technically, they're right.

Probably a bit of both, but mostly the latter. They're still trying to relive the days of "We're going to have a business selling [INSERT HERE] ON THE INTERNET!" and having people just throw cash at them with minimal effort.

Good for you. I did the same thing with my own sites years ago. Even spent 10 years co-locating servers for "complete" control. So I can sympathize.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Well ain't that great?

I should, perhaps... just stop going there!

For what it's worth, I trust VidiotMaps a lot more than I trust Wikia to fix the problem.

This.

Thus the Firefox/AdBlock Plus/NoScript combo that I highly recommend to my friends. If you must go with a non-Firefox browser, I've found Chrome to be my favorite. Of all of the browsers I tried, it was the only one that detected that I was trying to load malware.

The problem with that though is, at some point ad revenue will go down because advertisers realise how many block them, and then sites go under because they can't afford to exist. It's a one finger salute to malware, but potentially websites too.



Ugh, it's sad really. To use the internet we have to install multiple programs and disable features and stuff. And this is the future :\

To be honest, I don't care. It's callous, but oh, well. Ad revenue has already gone down multiple times. Many sites have already gone under because they can't afford to exist. Such is the internet. Ads are abhorrent. I use AdBlock and NoScript. I install Firefox on any friend's/family's computer I use that doesn't have it, and I include AdBlock and NoScript with the installation. I tell everyone I know to use AdBlock and NoScript if they are already using Firefox.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Given just a bit of information, you can find anything on the net.
If you go to Google and put in the phrase TonyV used, "Awesomely deep character skills" - in quotes, so that Google searches for the EXACT phrase, you'll get a number of hits. Click over to image search, and you'll see the ad in question as it appears on two different discussion forums. (Oh, and be warned that if you leave off the quotes, you'll be inundated with sexually explicit images so type carefully.)

As you might guess, the forum posters were expressing their low opinion of the ad and the game.

Tough. When I watch television, I have the option to change channels during the commercials. I am under no obligation to pay attention to, or even SEE, advertising.

However, I would think the percentage of web surfers who know how to block ads is relatively low. I mean, think about it, scammers are still sending 'Nigerian letters' because they WORK. Some people are really that stupid.

Okay, the payout on non-click-thru ads is disgustingly low. You'd have to be a traffic magnet something like Slashdot or Google to see appreciable cash out of them.

I have no problem subsidizing sites that want to put these type of ads up, but frankly, the cost bandwidth I consume simply pulling in the ad outstrips how much the site will make off the page view.

I do, however, REFUSE to subsidize sites that are (even by accident) serving up crapware infections like Wikia and the VidiotMaps site are serving. The one from VidiotMaps advertiser is exceptionally annoying because you have to go through about three popup confirmations before it'll let you close the page down.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Fortunately, the Paragon Wiki's "business" model forgoes that possibility.

I agree with the others. My opinion is that if you can't provide me a browsing experience in which the ads are unobtrusive and free of malware, then I am under no obligation to view your ads. I know that some argue that this is "stealing" content, and while I don't agree with that viewpoint, I do understand it.

Still, I have every right to take steps to protect my computer from harm that can be inflicted by third-party web sites, and with all of the exploits such as these out there, I consider not running unapproved third-party javascript code part of a sane and responsible security strategy.

Even when the Paragon Wiki was hosted at Wikia, I encouraged people to block the ads, especially when they fell through on their promises of the ads being discreet and not injected into the content of the articles. I'm glad we bailed out when we did, because from the looks of things, the site has gotten much, much worse.

And I seriously dispute the assertion that you have to bog your site down with advertising in order to make a profit. Google has made billions of dollars by doing just the opposite. Does anyone else here remember the days when search engines were trying to basically become ad portals? Google realized that less is more, and created an advertising strategy that gave both advertisers and consumers what they wanted: a useful service without being a pain in the a**. I had several conversations with the Powers That Be at Wikia to try to make them understand that, but as you can see, that was a fundamental difference of opinion we never saw eye-to-eye on.

I'm convinced that Wikia is a great idea. If they'd just stop being so greedy and focus more on providing a useful service to the community and less on turning every page into a billboard, I think it would be wildly successful, much more than it is now.

If you're on a limited-bandwidth connection, having every website load multiple 1+ MB flash ads basically means you don't get to do much of anything on the Internet. Wireless companies can all go to hell. I'm thoroughly pleased to be free from their grasp for the time being...

I don't think it's stealing content or anything, I just disagree with the attitude where anyone who has advertising is doing it wrong and screw them, which a lot of people take. It's no-win really.



To be honest, this is more just moaning about how the future is having to have multiple programs and applications running to be safe but then at the same time be hurting the sites you want to see keep going. It'll probably only get worse too, the average internet user don't check message boards and the like which is pretty much the way you find out about programs like these, and at the same time everything is pushing you to do everything online.

In the options, set it not to pop up the message. Also, keep in mind that if you run across pages where you do want scripts to run, right-click on the NoScript icon and whitelist the site. But try whitelisting only that site.

For example, if you whitelist youtube.com and ytimg.com, YouTube will work without a problem.

I've done that, but now I don't actually know when it's blocking stuff and the like, and when something isn't running I have a random selection of URLs to guess which ones I need and stuff. It's like I just went onto Facebook to play Mafia Wars, the page isn't fully scrolling, I don't know if that is noscript, something else (AVG and/or ZA have been having a fun not fully loading site problem in recent times) or what. Is this now my safe internet viewing experience? Constantly looking at not entirely working sites and wondering what is actually causing it?

For Facebook, right-click on the NoScript icon and pick Allow facebook.com and then repeat for fbcdn.net.

If you have any question about whether it's NoScript causing an issue, right-click on the icon, pick Temporarily allow all this page, and if it's still hosed up, it's not NoScript.

And yes, when you first install it, it's kind of a pain to allow just the right scripts to run so that your most common sites work correctly. Keep in mind, however, that once you do, assuming that you're like me and you browse the same 20 or so sites around 95% of the time, you won't have to fool with it again for a long time.

And yes, some sites are stupid and don't work at all without enabling javascript on a bunch of third-party sites. But believe me, in the long run, the pain in the butt of whitelisting a handful of sites is so worth knowing that your machine won't be compromised by a piece of malware. (And that those stupid Flash ads are gone forever!)

In general, I don't mind whitelisting javascript on a site itself. For example, if you're at thisismysite.com, I wouldn't really hesitate to whitelist thisismysite.com. But all of those doubleclick.com, fastclick.com, google-analytics.com, etc., those are forever blocked.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.