Adult Ads

[Mike Null]

Scott

The answer to your question is yes, at least in my case. When I click on the Amazon item it takes me to a screen which has my name on it (former Amazon shopper).

[Scott Donley]

Scott

The answer to your question is yes, at least in my case. When I click on the Amazon item it takes me to a screen which has my name on it (former Amazon shopper).

Then maybe, just maybe, the OP's real problem might be Amazon and his browsing history. Not saying porn per say, but perhaps books ?

[Jim Becker]

Scott, Amazon does keep track of particular customers' preferences and if your daughter has an account, there may be a cookie that identifies as such and affects the items served. And that could be very interesting given the depth and breadth of what you can shop for at Amazon. Their business intellegence is almost unparalleled when it comes to understanding their customers and leveraging it for suggestive selling.

[Scott Donley]

Jim, just for the heck of it, I logged into Amazon using my daughters account but on my computer. (she used my CC). Now when I go back to SMC on this computer the banner is offering me pearl earrings, a dress from target, and a deal on panty's. I just hope I can undo this

[Rick Gifford]

Scott, Amazon does keep track of particular customers' preferences and if your daughter has an account, there may be a cookie that identifies as such and affects the items served. And that could be very interesting given the depth and breadth of what you can shop for at Amazon. Their business intellegence is almost unparalleled when it comes to understanding their customers and leveraging it for suggestive selling.

I shop alot on Amazon. I wish the adverts would only show tools etc so I could take advantage of doing my buying and the creek getting a cut.

If I understand right, the creek only gets a cut if we follow a specific advert and buy it?

[Christopher Pine]

All I can say is congratulations! This is just amazing how much growth has happened in just the few years I have been participating. I came to the creek because of the freedom pens program. This was not very long after I returned from a place very near Iraq with the guard unit I am a member of. I liked the neigborhood here so I have stuck around. I am not the most active person on here but I sure enjoy reading and learing from you all.
Peace!
How cool is this that next year a person will be making a living off of the creek! Providing for his family and stimulating our economy. Very Cool!

Chris

We are working on the issue but it takes time and we all have full time jobs and families.
The Creek is growing, we now have two professional System Administrators to keep things going around here. These people expect to be paid for their services so we must find a source of revenue to pay their labor and to expand our sever capacity and bandwidth in the coming months. By next year one of our System Administrators will be a full time employee.

Many people don't understand how big The Creek is these days, to the best of my knowledge we are the number one woodworking forum on the Net and growing beyond belief every day. There is little time to plan for our growth right now, it is happening so fast every day is critical that we make the best decisions we can so we can provide the support necessary for the next day, week and month.

We have to give these ads a chance to bear fruit if we are going to be able to provide free access here, there isn't any other way. Jackie, Aaron and I have put together a fee matrix for contract banners that we hope will provide the majority of our financial needs. We are just starting to market our banner ads now...we need some time folks to make this happen.

We must make decisions today to provide for The Creek six months from now, this is our critical time line. If we bury our heads in the sand the problem will over-run us so quick we might not be able to recover. We are experiencing over three thousand new posts per day and 7.6 million page views per month which includes our "Guest" load. New registrations are now averaging 2,100 per month, just a few months ago in November we were averaging 1,500 new registrations per month. Soon we will need to start purchasing some very expensive equipment that will be necessary to support the load here by the end of this year. We will soon overrun our current backup equipment which will need to be replaced and at a hefty price plus we will need to add bandwidth very soon if we are going to keep The Creek from slowing down.

Soon we will be hosting personal Photo Galleries and Blogs for people here, this will increase our traffic but we don't know how much at this point. The Creek isn't a Truck any longer it is a Train and it is picking up speed every day.

Possibly as early as next year we will have our custom Shop Tours module, this will surely double our total traffic here in just a few months....we will clearly be the most comprehensive and largest provider of woodworking information on this planet in a very short time with features that others aren't even considering today.

Think about it.........there has to be some growing pains along the way. No matter how hard we try to plan for all of the problems that might come our way we will miss something or underestimate our needs from time to time or even fail to consider something like how keywords may affect our Forums. We will deal with issues the best we can as fast as we can.

[Bruce Benjamin]

Bruce,

As Chris said, time stamps mean very little to me, especially in this. (Especially since I did not even look at the time stamp).

With that said, you may very well be correct. I may not have needed to stir this up or anything. I may have been a little overdue on this one but that post was six or so months in the making and this was just the latest in a number of posts that I have read that I thought we unduly harsh on the admin and mods.

The admin and mods are either, to proud, or modest, or professional to say it so bluntly and that is why I felt the need to say it myself.

Things like this have happened before, they will happen again. As said, mistakes happen all the time and there will be more. The entire point of my post was that when things do happen please bring it to their attention and leave it at that and let them fix it. They are providing a free service after all.

Also, I sincerely apologize if this caused and bad feelings. This was not the intention and I am sorry if you may feel that way. When things like this happen I believe that the admin and mods feelings could well be hurt too but they cannot say it.

Matt

No need to apologize, Matt. But I gotta say that I just haven't seen much of the complaining that you speak of. I think that's the reason you rarely see Keith or any of the other staff members speaking up about it. I don't read every post on every one of the forums on SMC so maybe I'm missing them. But I do usually check out many of the posts on the General WW forum and all of the post on the Eurekazone forum. I also sometimes visit some of the other forums. If the ongoing complaints are there I must be blind to them for some reason. I'm not saying there's zero complaints but considering the size of the forums I'd say things go pretty smoothly. I think we can both agree that we're glad the SMC exists.

Bruce

[Matthew Poeller]

Bruce,

Very correct, I can definitely agree with that.

Maybe it is just when I get the chance to log on that I find them. I do not get to frequent the creek as often as I would like. Probably too that posts like this are often in forums that are not frequented as much as others. Which explains that why, when I logged on today this was the first post in that forum (it was a day old) and I could not resist the thread title.

In most cases I found them during change and usually at the expense of the people that volunteer. That is why it irks me so. But again, you are correct if you did a percentage analysis I would bet these are less than 1%.

As we are seeing from the threads in this post it may very well not be SMC at all, but the cookies and cache that are on a users' computer. That makes me glad that I brought it up so that poeple would investigate a bit on their own and find out the adds may very well be not an issue with SMC at all.

And yet another civilized disagreement (maybe, since I am not even sure it was a disagreement) solved by gentlemen (well you at least) on a wonderful forum.

Matt

[Bruce Benjamin]

And yet another civilized disagreement (maybe, since I am not even sure it was a disagreement) solved by gentlemen (well you at least) on a wonderful forum.

Matt

That sure works for me, Matt.

Bruce

[Jay Jolliffe]

For SMC to benefit from the ads do you have to buy from Amazon or does SMC get something for just looking at the ads at Amazon.

[Keith Outten]

Jay,

We receive a small percentage of every purchase when you use our link to shop at Amazon. I think we have made about fifty bucks so far.

[Jim Becker]

Keith is correct. Amazon's program let's you shop freely after accessing the "store" via an affiliate link. There is no restriction on what kind of merchandise you can buy...which means you can combine what "you" want with what you are also buying for the LOYL to, umm....compensate... ...and still benefit the affiliate of your choice.

[Keith Outten]

I have to say I am relieved to find out that the Adult Advertisement problem is probably a cookie issue and not specifically a SawMill Creek issue. I didn't see the ad, probably because I never been to Amazon....I spend about 98% of my Internet Time either here on the Creek or on the ShopBot Forum.

I'm sure that Aaron will continue to look for ways to prevent it from happening again but we can't do anything about cookies on other people's computers. As disturbing as this kind of situation is I'm not surprised and I have expected all along that we would have to deal with some issues that never existed under the Member Supported model where we had total control here.

Most of you know that I have never been a fan of advertising here at The Creek. I had hoped that we would never have to go in this direction and that The Creek could be different in this respect but in spite of my efforts for three years to try and convince the masses here we finally had to make the change and accept the status quo. This is how everyone else does it and what the majority here expect.

There is a group of about 1100 people who have embraced what I had hoped would make SawMill Creek totally different from any other Community on the Internet. These people stuck it out with me for three years while I tried to get the majority here to understand why we thought it was so important for SawMill Creek to be self supporting. Hundreds of people sent me email and Private Messages advising me to adopt an advertising based support system over the last three years. Hard-headed as I am I kept hoping that if we stayed the course people would come around. This year the majority of people who visit here convinced me that I was dead wrong so I accepted that we would have to change or go off-line.

The Contributors side of The Creek will always be special to me and I will continue to provide as much support as I can to those who have been so generous, SawMill Creek would not exist today if not for the people who have been Contributors since November 2005. As long as I am here the Contributors side of The Creek will continue to be as close to what I had always wanted for this Community as possible.

The two tiered system will work here because we all meet in the middle and our growth rate is solid proof that something we are doing is appreciated by a large number of people. I have admitted many times that we adopted the Badger Pond model right from the start here which I have always thought was the best decision we ever made. The two sided approach is a bit of a twist from what we have been doing in the past but I believe it will work well over time.

Change is inevitable I guess so we are adjusting in order to remain online. We will continue to enforce our Terms of Service here, they aren't perfect but they work. Even though we are now for the most part an advertising supported Community I am deleting new registrations every day when people refuse to use their first and last names. I know that many people here use aliases, this is something we can't control and we surely won't fight a battle we can't win. What we can do is continue to make sure that the atmosphere here remains as it has always been, I believe this is the key reason why woodworkers visit The Creek and join our community.

Let's move forward.......

.

[Aaron Beaver]

Are the financial reports of the Creek public? Only reason I ask is because another forum I belong to ask for donations to help maintain and what not, but every so often they post the financial information and you can see where it went and how much they have left. I am not trying to step on any toes or be intrusive, I was just curious really.

[Glenn Clabo]

Keith has taken this responsibility under his company...which is run like any other business. His financial records are not public.

I have said all along...it's Keith idea and his families hard work and financial support that made it what it is. Now that I see what goes on in the background to keep this going smoothly...I hope he makes enough money to retire to Bimini.