BoM Newsletter Coming Soon!

Remove all ads!

Lately I've noticed that my own activity in several other online communities that I'm a member of is spurred largely by the mailings reminding me to check out their new content, so I've decided to implement something similar for Sorcerer's Place as well.

Introducing the Boards o' Magick Newsletter, a.k.a. Latest Threads on Boards o' Magick!

This new newsletter/mailing will be a simple periodical listing of recently created new threads on our forums, with handy links to jump right into the discussion.

The mailing will be sent to all of our registered users who have opted into receiving our site mailings (revise your setting and e-mail address here), initially about twice a month only so have no fear that we'll be flooding your inbox.

It is my hope that these gentle reminder mailings will bring some of our long lost members back for a visit every once in a while, as well as generate a livelier atmosphere on the forums that comes with a more active user base.

If you're not interested in receiving this periodical mailing, information on how to unsubscribe and/or retrieve your login information will be included at the bottom of every mailing.

I'll also be including a link to this thread in the mailing and welcome your feedback!

 

Got mine. Not sure if you can tailor it, but it leads off with "we have missed you" which seems odd considering I check in usually at least once a day.

Also, I noticed that the Playground forum somehow and somewhere acquired a leading "-" so it now looks like "-Playground"

 

The missing bit was mostly aimed at users gone for a longer period, which at this point is the majority really. I will see about making the wording more appropriate also for those who check in recently in the future mailings though, thanks for the heads up.

The Playground bit is just due to sorting of the forums to display in the mailing, so you can ignore it, it'll be gone in future mailings.

 

It's actually only been installed recently because the number of people visiting the site who also use ad blockers has risen above 60%, which is making running the site without significantly increasing the amount of advertising for the non-blocking users effectively impossible. Compared to most other gaming sites, SP is very ads-lite as it is. The alternative is slapping about 20 ads on every single page like Wikia does, but I'd rather not do that.

This is probably a topic for its own thread but I imagine that you can understand that keeping this site online and all the content available to everyone for free means that somebody has to pay everything from the monthly server bills to software licence renewals. Everyone visiting the site with an ad blocker takes away our ability to generate any income from their visits, offloading the expense to what is now the minority of users who don't block ads or choose to support the site with a donation, which enables them to disable ads in a legitimate fashion.

The situation is very similar across most gaming sites and while the larger ones with better paying advertising can still afford to incur constantly growing losses due to ad blockers, smaller ones such as ours can't. Many sites are resorting to pleading with people to disable their ad blockers, but this approach has proven to be completely ineffective. With the number of people blocking ads constantly growing, the only effective solution is a radical one. While I hate to see anyone go, the fact is that we're not putting up a pay wall or anything requiring anyone to pay anything. We're only asking people to disable their ad blockers for our domain.

But naturally, I understand that even this will be too big of an ask for many people who either don't realize that to keep the lights on we need to be able to pay the bills every month, or simply don't care. The most that I can do is to explain the situation to those willing to listen because I know that many people genuinely don't realize that their ad blocking can have any kind of a meaningful consequence on the operation of websites that they visit. Initially, it really didn't. Up to the point when everyone and their grandmother started to do it.

 

Better late than never.