In my book Donations are like Honey

1. Obligation percieved or otherwise.
2. Thepropertypin.com is essentially privately run but for public access, voluntarily by a bunch of random inter-nerds ')

I personally don't want to take peoples money in the form of donaitons. So its as much a personal decision as anything else.

Advertising is the neutral option in my eyes.

My fear was also that people would take doanitons way more personally (plus we would be fopisted with all manner of percieved obligaitons), so its funny that people might take the little ads top and bottom personally too but with the increased use of this site by commercial interests for good or ill made the case for adverts only in my book.

To be honest I really dont think the ads get in the way.

I was showing it to someone the other day and I had told them previously I had just put the ads up, afterwards I asked,"so what do you think of the ads,".... "what ads?," they replied.

They don't have to do anything, but in my experience it keeps things ticking along nice and smoothly, and mods don't have to put up with angry posts accusing them of doing X,Y and Z with their money which is 'ostensibly' collected solely to pay for server costs.

High class hookers n whiskey, I hope!

Somebody needs to have some good old fashioned fun amongst all the bloody negativity

Agreed. Now if people like this site and want to show some support I suggest you get ad clicking! Don't have to read them just open in a new tab and forget about it till you close your browser (or is the payment system more sophisticated than that??). I consider that action my subscription fee

Alternatively OW could get rid of the ads and ask the CIF for donations

For those people who don't like the ads, may I recommend Firefox and Adblock? Or even better, Adblock Plus:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

(I've been using this for years, to the point where when I use somebody else's computer I'm always surprised by how much junk most sites put on the screen.)

Please only click on the adverts if you are genuinely intrigued, googleads is a little smarter in the sense that if they see some sort of syndicated clicking behaviour and look into it, they'll just bar the 'pin account, they did this with Casey Serin's supporterz...

I've given my tuppence in the private forums but I'll add it here as well. I'm willing to donate with no strings attached and do think ads devalue the place slightly I won't be clicking on the ads as I don't think it's fair on the advertisers. It's a decision for me to make as to whether I think the ethos of the admins fits with what I'm looking for.

Not sure I quite follow!

In whether you're willing to donate or not? Is that what you mean, ARW???

Yes, I mean OW has said that he feels donations would make him "obligated" in some way to the donators. I understand why he would feel that way because it might mean he has to run the site in a way he feels that the donators expect the site to be run rather than the way he would like to run it. But we're all adults here, so if I trust the administrators (roughly yourself & OW) and I donate, I'm saying that I'm happy with the way the site is being run and I'm happy to go with whatever decisions you make. In other words it shouldn't be seen as obligating you, but that's just expressing my personal view.

In a hypothetical scenario I donated and the day after you ran up the hammer and sickle and issued press releases calling for the overthrow of capitalism, I'd just piss off and my donation wouldn't matter to me. What's the worst a donator can do other than cause trouble and make you feel a bit bad?

Pah... We run the Hammer & Sickle up every day...

It's obvious, no matter what we all say here, there will always be someone who will feel their donation buys them a personal stake in the matter, in much the same way as people keep saying this is a bear site despite me being blue in the face telling them it is a discussion forum and nothing more...

I agree.

I got a full year of free entertainment from the good aul Casey. The comments were hilarious. I noticed that you posted a few times, I posted a few times as "Father Ted"