Ads on the wiki

1. What are some ways we can make ads less painful (ad placement, ad network choice, etc)?

One in the leftnav and one at the top of a page would be fine. I think you may do better with Google AdSense than Project Wonderful because you're more niche specific and google gives a pretty good control over what sort of ads get shown and has decent contextual relevance. As everyone else has said, avoiding flash and the perverse should be enough to make it semi-tasteful.

2. If you use an ad blocker, how can we get you to whitelist our site for ads?

The only ad blockers I use are at the firewall level of the router, so no exceptions. I'd hope you wouldn't have any of those networks anyway, they're nasty.

3. Would you consider donating money to save everyone the trouble of ads? This option is only acceptable if we can get a constant flow of donations.

No, and I don't encourage this route, donations are too sporadic and inconsistent to support you.

4. Would you pay a sum of money to disable ads for yourself for some length of time?

Possibly. I definitely recommend giving this option if you can make it work via user level and create a user that's exempt.

There's always shopping around for someone else to buy & run the site too if keeping it running is more important than who is running it. That's how I ended up with most the sites I own actually.

We will do our best not to pick a terribly shady ad network. Regarding 3, the reason I asked is to gauge how many people would be willing to donate. It sounds like you're not far off the mark, though. We are shying away from 4 now due to an earlier reply that you can see. We aren't quite in the situation where we would need to consider selling the site, either, but thanks for the suggestion!

I just hope that the level of control over Google AdSense lets you prune out the MMO gold seller agencies; I've seen it crop up before on other sites I've browsed in IE Mode. Goodness knows we have enough gold seller bots in the game itself. Which sort of brings up an interesting question - what kind of stuff would be advertised? Other MMOs? Console and PC gamess? J-List/J-Box was covered earlier, perhaps other "geek culture" type companies could be used?

A quick Google shows that we may not be able to handle the gold selling 100%, but we will make sure to look into it more. I think the things you mentioned sound about right. As for other niche networks that do this kind of stuff, I'm not familiar with these things. We'll have to look into that more as well.

As a user of them, I can attest to it being pretty thorough. You can block ads by URL, network or category and if you're really and truly concerned you can actually force all ads to go through a queue to be individually approved before you let them come through on your site. Until you approve new/pending ads only ads you've previously allowed to come through will and you set up fail-over ads for periods where you have nothing appropriate to show, for example your own internal advertisements or partners you want to include in the rotation.

That sounds plenty flexible for what we need. I was unaware AdSense let you work by whitelist. The thing I read was that the blacklist of ads could only be so long and that people were actually hitting it.

I've never hit that problem, with my own configuration I've blocked most of what I don't want showing up just by categorically denying those content categories/sub categories and only had to resort to three explicit URL blocks because those three sites technically count as allowed categories but are for competing sites that have policies restricting mention of mine so don't deserve non-reciprocal advertising.

Feel free to message me any questions you may think of or be curious about, I'm quite an advocate of them compared to other things I've tried in the past.