Adf.ly advertisement (Was: Impossible to download anything)

[rkaye]

had the same problem (not being able to download anything) a few days ago (using firefox with noscript). the 'skip ad' button shows up, but clicking on it did/does nothing -- it stays stuck on that screen.

eventually was able to download using internet explorer.

everyone has to pay bills, maybe gcw can offer 'premium user' thingie? gcw is my goto site, so i'd chip in a few $/year to keep them afloat...

[Joe Forster/STA]

I think that until a significant amount of paying "premium" users are gathered, maintenance related to them (expanding database, creating registration pages, getting a PayPal account or whatever, bookkeeping, automated toggling of "premium" flags, whatever) would mean too much work so changing a free site into a (partially) paid site would have an initial overhead that the administrator may probably not be willing to do.

Apart from that, GCW was always meant to be free, in the way that users don't have to pay directly for the downloads - that leaves the other method: advertizing - and I know that Empire is not going to change this.

Third, what would "premium" users get for their money? There's nothing on GCW that you cannot download for free. Most people prefer free stuff so I don't think that enough visitors would volunteer to pay for using the site, which gets us back to my first paragraph. If you're thinking of something like a "charity shop", it may work in the real world, where people are used to having to pay for stuff, it doesn't really work in the digital world, where people usually can find a free solution for all of their needs, whether or not that solution is legal.