Please, don't use ad blocking on this site

[Ori-Al]

I've had it disabled here for a long time.

[TouchemAll]

Tony,

Please don't get rid of Plus memberships. In fact, if financials are an issue for you, consider increasing the price of Plus memberships, or offering an additional-cost "Plus-plus" membership (think of Gausman's changeup) that doesn't serve ads at all. I would gladly buy it.

I'm fine with supporting this site financially. However, I am strongly against Internet advertisements, and I'll note that them being an "eye sore" is the least of my worries. Here are, then, my objections to them in order from most severe to least, and why I use AdBlock Edge on all sites:

1. Security. There are security issues with the way that many (most) advertisements are served. Ad networks may claim that they go to great lengths to ensure that all the ads they serve do not pose a threat to your computer or your data, but by and large this is simply not the case. As a practicing Information Security Engineer Professional, I can assure you that these advertisements, while mostly benign, could still possibly pose an information security threat to the user if the advertisement is allowed to serve content that causes buffer overflows, injects code, or any number of other possible attack vectors. Flash-based ads are an order of magnitude more dangerous than images, which are in turn an order of magnitude more dangerous than plain text. I would be more inclined to allow plain text ads, but it seems that most ads served today are flash, images, or both.
2. Bandwidth caps. My home internet connection is technically "unlimited", but there is a soft cap on how much I can download each month, and if I exceed that amount, my bandwidth can get throttled significantly if the connection is saturated by other subscribers. To minimize the amount of data that I download, and thus extend my soft bandwidth cap as far as possible, I prevent all advertisements from even being downloaded.
3. Performance. Even if I had a truly unlimited, uncapped internet connection -- which I don't -- I still wouldn't want to download advertisements, because it slows down the rendering of the webpage by adding complexity to the Document Object Model (DOM), and increases the time to download the webpage because "legitimate" page resources (such as javascript, images, and HTML) are competing for bandwidth with "unwanted" resources (such as ads). I often visit these forums on small, low-power mobile devices such as low-end laptops or tablets, and these weak systems noticeably slow down if there are ads all over the page, but the site loads smooth as silk if ads are blocked.
4. I will never click on them. I have never clicked on an Internet advertisement in my life. Ever. Not even before I knew about adblockers. I lived with the Internet and its advertisements for 12 years before I started blocking ads, and I never clicked on a single one.

   When I actively seek information, I use a search engine. I consider advertisements to be unnecessarily subversive and persuasive; if I have the need to do business with a company, I will find them, and I will do business with them of my own accord. An advertisement's attempts to persuade me to do business can only lead me to lose control over my life if I take them up on these "offers", because there is always (always!) a catch. Remember, the only time a salesman or a politician is lying is when his mouth is moving (or in this case, his fingers on his keyboard or his hand on his mouse).

5. Work. I occasionally visit this site at work. For one thing, the corporate internet connection itself blocks some of the advertisements on this site, and I have no control over that whatsoever. I literally cannot prevent it from blocking these ads, unless I don't visit the site from work at all. Also, I am asked by management at work to minimize my personal internet browsing's impact on the performance of the shared Internet resource at work. To help with that, I also have Adblock installed on my work machine, to clean up any ads that don't get blocked by the proxy. This also reduces the attack surface for having work data exfiltrated to some hacker (see my first point on Security).
6. I have money, and I gladly part with it to help out businesses and websites I respect. I respect the Orioles Hangout. I like what you're doing for the Orioles fan community. I enjoy the forums and the game recaps. I am a working, salaried professional and I make a living wage. I'm more than willing to part with enough money that you will make more from me than if I were the most gullible, ad-loving person in the world and visited this website 24/7/365. No need to annoy me, potentially expose me to security vulnerabilities, slow down my systems, or take up my bandwidth to get money out of me.

Please consider offering an "ad-free" subscription addon, or make it part of the default Plus package. Increase the price if you need to. But for the love of God please don't think that you need to ask people to disable adblock and then get rid of Plus altogether... that is going "backwards".

Here is my point of view on how I will personally react based on the decisions you make from here.

Choice 1: If you make no changes and the "status quo" continues, where you offer Plus subscriptions but the subscription does not come with disabling ads as a feature, I will continue to block the ads, and I will continue to maintain my Plus membership. I feel that supporting you with my subscription is "enough".

Choice 2: If you introduce an increased-price Plus subscription, or an addon subscription that disables ads, I will buy the most expensive subscription available, assuming it's reasonable (I can spare on the order of $100/year, but $1000/year is not worth it to talk to a bunch of Internet people ). I will continue to block ads when I'm visiting the site while not logged-in, etc.

Choice 3: If you remove the option for fans to buy any premium "paid" subscriptions at all, my conscience will force me to stop visiting the site. I can't reconcile "visit and watch the ads" due to my objections above, and I can't reconcile "visit and block the ads anyway without paying anything" because I'd just be taking up your bandwidth, and I have a moral objection to that because of the amount of respect I have for your small business (I'm OK with blocking ads on large sites that are profitable large corporations because my ad revenue is not even a drop in the ocean to them.) I wouldn't want to have to stop visiting the site, but I simply can't view the ads due to my concerns about security, bandwidth and performance, and I can't in good conscience block the ads against your will while not giving you any compensation whatsoever.

Count me in I don't block the ad's AND I would pay extra for a NON-AD site and your security issue is DEAD on as a software engineer I agree.

[LoyalBirdFan]

Tony,

Please don't get rid of Plus memberships. In fact, if financials are an issue for you, consider increasing the price of Plus memberships, or offering an additional-cost "Plus-plus" membership (think of Gausman's changeup) that doesn't serve ads at all. I would gladly buy it.

I'm fine with supporting this site financially. However, I am strongly against Internet advertisements, and I'll note that them being an "eye sore" is the least of my worries. Here are, then, my objections to them in order from most severe to least, and why I use AdBlock Edge on all sites:

1. Security. There are security issues with the way that many (most) advertisements are served. Ad networks may claim that they go to great lengths to ensure that all the ads they serve do not pose a threat to your computer or your data, but by and large this is simply not the case. As a practicing Information Security Engineer Professional, I can assure you that these advertisements, while mostly benign, could still possibly pose an information security threat to the user if the advertisement is allowed to serve content that causes buffer overflows, injects code, or any number of other possible attack vectors. Flash-based ads are an order of magnitude more dangerous than images, which are in turn an order of magnitude more dangerous than plain text. I would be more inclined to allow plain text ads, but it seems that most ads served today are flash, images, or both.
2. Bandwidth caps. My home internet connection is technically "unlimited", but there is a soft cap on how much I can download each month, and if I exceed that amount, my bandwidth can get throttled significantly if the connection is saturated by other subscribers. To minimize the amount of data that I download, and thus extend my soft bandwidth cap as far as possible, I prevent all advertisements from even being downloaded.
3. Performance. Even if I had a truly unlimited, uncapped internet connection -- which I don't -- I still wouldn't want to download advertisements, because it slows down the rendering of the webpage by adding complexity to the Document Object Model (DOM), and increases the time to download the webpage because "legitimate" page resources (such as javascript, images, and HTML) are competing for bandwidth with "unwanted" resources (such as ads). I often visit these forums on small, low-power mobile devices such as low-end laptops or tablets, and these weak systems noticeably slow down if there are ads all over the page, but the site loads smooth as silk if ads are blocked.
4. I will never click on them. I have never clicked on an Internet advertisement in my life. Ever. Not even before I knew about adblockers. I lived with the Internet and its advertisements for 12 years before I started blocking ads, and I never clicked on a single one.

   When I actively seek information, I use a search engine. I consider advertisements to be unnecessarily subversive and persuasive; if I have the need to do business with a company, I will find them, and I will do business with them of my own accord. An advertisement's attempts to persuade me to do business can only lead me to lose control over my life if I take them up on these "offers", because there is always (always!) a catch. Remember, the only time a salesman or a politician is lying is when his mouth is moving (or in this case, his fingers on his keyboard or his hand on his mouse).

5. Work. I occasionally visit this site at work. For one thing, the corporate internet connection itself blocks some of the advertisements on this site, and I have no control over that whatsoever. I literally cannot prevent it from blocking these ads, unless I don't visit the site from work at all. Also, I am asked by management at work to minimize my personal internet browsing's impact on the performance of the shared Internet resource at work. To help with that, I also have Adblock installed on my work machine, to clean up any ads that don't get blocked by the proxy. This also reduces the attack surface for having work data exfiltrated to some hacker (see my first point on Security).
6. I have money, and I gladly part with it to help out businesses and websites I respect. I respect the Orioles Hangout. I like what you're doing for the Orioles fan community. I enjoy the forums and the game recaps. I am a working, salaried professional and I make a living wage. I'm more than willing to part with enough money that you will make more from me than if I were the most gullible, ad-loving person in the world and visited this website 24/7/365. No need to annoy me, potentially expose me to security vulnerabilities, slow down my systems, or take up my bandwidth to get money out of me.

Please consider offering an "ad-free" subscription addon, or make it part of the default Plus package. Increase the price if you need to. But for the love of God please don't think that you need to ask people to disable adblock and then get rid of Plus altogether... that is going "backwards".

Here is my point of view on how I will personally react based on the decisions you make from here.

Choice 1: If you make no changes and the "status quo" continues, where you offer Plus subscriptions but the subscription does not come with disabling ads as a feature, I will continue to block the ads, and I will continue to maintain my Plus membership. I feel that supporting you with my subscription is "enough".

Choice 2: If you introduce an increased-price Plus subscription, or an addon subscription that disables ads, I will buy the most expensive subscription available, assuming it's reasonable (I can spare on the order of $100/year, but $1000/year is not worth it to talk to a bunch of Internet people ). I will continue to block ads when I'm visiting the site while not logged-in, etc.

Choice 3: If you remove the option for fans to buy any premium "paid" subscriptions at all, my conscience will force me to stop visiting the site. I can't reconcile "visit and watch the ads" due to my objections above, and I can't reconcile "visit and block the ads anyway without paying anything" because I'd just be taking up your bandwidth, and I have a moral objection to that because of the amount of respect I have for your small business (I'm OK with blocking ads on large sites that are profitable large corporations because my ad revenue is not even a drop in the ocean to them.) I wouldn't want to have to stop visiting the site, but I simply can't view the ads due to my concerns about security, bandwidth and performance, and I can't in good conscience block the ads against your will while not giving you any compensation whatsoever.

Really good and honest post..... I couldn't have said it better myself.

[luismatos4prez]

It looks like allquixotic beat me to it, but I hate looking at ads. I don't watch cable and I don't browse the internet unless I can block ads. I only want to give my time and money to companies I support. That's why I bought a plus membership here and it's why I support the ad blocking software developers.

[sfosfan]

Done.

Now if i get a terrible virus from one of these ads and it destroys my hard drive, can I send you the bill Tony?

keep up the great work,

sfosfan

[Austin]

It looks like allquixotic beat me to it, but I hate looking at ads. I don't watch cable and I don't browse the internet unless I can block ads. I only want to give my time and money to companies I support. That's why I bought a plus membership here and it's why I support the ad blocking software developers.

I don't mean to speak for Tony but it sounds like the Plus memberships aren't enough to cover it - I am sure the ads are necessary to keep the site running. I will say that I would consider paying more for my plus membership if it meant no ads, but I don't consider the ads a deal-breaker at all.

[allquixotic]

It looks like allquixotic beat me to it, but I hate looking at ads. I don't watch cable and I don't browse the internet unless I can block ads. I only want to give my time and money to companies I support. That's why I bought a plus membership here and it's why I support the ad blocking software developers.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but just to clarify, the point of my post was not "I hate looking at ads". In fact, if they were provably benign, like watching an advertisement on TV, I'd probably allow them. But advertisements are by their very nature active content that runs on your PC, and regardless of what format they are in, some code has to be executed to display them. I simply do not trust companies that design advertisements or ad networks to not be malicious. On the other hand, I'm fine with displaying all the dynamic content Tony wants to throw at me -- I trust him. I just don't trust the people he's doing business with (the ad networks).

Sorry, but my dislike for viewing ads isn't even in my list of objections. To summarize my post that way is a mischaracterization of my point.

To look at it another way, I would be 100.0% fine with advertisements on this site, IF all the following were true:

1. Advertisements were sandboxed in such a way that the security weaknesses, including information leakage, buffer overflow exploits, browser hijacking, etc. were impossible.
2. I had a truly unlimited internet connection and could download all the ads Tony throws at me without even a hint of throttling from my ISP.
3. All of my computers (on which I visit OH) were modern, up to date desktops or full-scale laptops with great performance capable of smoothly rendering animated ads in addition to the dynamic content on the page.
4. My workplace had no restrictions whatsoever on personal use of the corporate internet, and had exorbitant amounts of spare bandwidth capacity to just give away.
5. I were actively looking to buy new products and spend money on things like cars, mail-order brides, baseball memorabilia, or whatever else is being sold on these ad networks, and search engines didn't exist.
6. I were unemployed or dependent on others for my money, and thus unable to financially support the Hangout on my paycheck.

Note that none of these things have anything to do with the ads being annoying, or their appearance, or their content, except for (one could argue) the 5th point. It's not that I don't agree with your point; it's just that your objection ("I hate ads") is not really an issue for me. I have several reasons which are, in my view, more important and more objective, for wanting an ad-free Plus subscription.

[luismatos4prez]

I'm not disagreeing with you, but just to clarify, the point of my post was not "I hate looking at ads".

Haha I know. I'm pretty extreme in that regard. You beat to me to the "I'm not going to click on ads so keep the plus memberships so I can support the business" idea. Shoulda clarified

[byrdz]

I'd be interested in a paid account that gets rid of the advertising. Much like many smartphone apps.

[skanar]

Used adblock for years and never thought about it. Tried turning it off here, and load times went from near-instantaneous to 10-15 secs or so for each page. That's a big difference!

[Malike]

Hangouters,

I know some people are using browser addons to cancel out ads but I would ask you add an exception for this site. Ads are the lifeblood that allows us to bring you this forum and site and the more people that go towards these addons, the harder it will be to bring you these services for free.

We have ensured all of our networks do not include "automatic audio" and no ads should redirect you to any site. We will never employ pop ups or pop unders as well. We've worked hard to make the ads as non-intrusive as we can and will continue to do so, but please help us by allowing the ads.

Honestly, I've seen some interesting products on them and have clicked on them myself to check them out and bought some things I would not have known about.

In the end, we don't want to ads to take away from your experience, but we need those ads to show up. In fact, we are considering getting rid of our plus memberships if our ad revenue can improve. That can only happen with your help.

Thanke for the consdieration and for being a member or our community.

- Tony

I don't do ads on any site. Ever. Ever.

Exception made for Mr. Pente. Whitelisted OH.

I never do ads!

[scOtt]

I just removed a nasty ad virus on my wife's pc. It placed two large vertical bars of ads down the left and right sides of most web sites. But that is not all. It changed random words on the web site's text into hyperlinks, so as you moved your mouse over the word small pop-up windows would appear with ads in them. It was god-awful. I removed all ad-on extensions from my wife's browser but that did not stop it. I ran full scans of Norton 360 but that didn't pick up anything. I then installed brand new versions of chrome and firefox (she was using ie) but those too were infected. Finally I stumbled on a free ad removal tool specifically for this virus. It removed the underlying infected program (some weather crap thing my wife clicked on) and also cleaned out the registry. Thank goodness for the kindness of whoever made that removal tool available.

What program was that?

[Tony-OH]

I don't mean to speak for Tony but it sounds like the Plus memberships aren't enough to cover it - I am sure the ads are necessary to keep the site running. I will say that I would consider paying more for my plus membership if it meant no ads, but I don't consider the ads a deal-breaker at all.

This site would not exist of not for ads and neither would a lot of other sites on the internet. I understand some people's concerns, but honestly, all they are doing is making doing business on the interent a lot harder. People like things free to them, and that means advertising. The networks we use are above the board and are not a security risk.

I'm not trying to stifle anyone's opinions and I understand the concerns and appreciate that almost everyone has bought plus memberships to offset, but this site would not exists today without advertising. If it's non-attrusive, I don't see the issues. But then again, I run a business that relies on them.

[Tony-OH]

I'm not disagreeing with you, but just to clarify, the point of my post was not "I hate looking at ads". In fact, if they were provably benign, like watching an advertisement on TV, I'd probably allow them. But advertisements are by their very nature active content that runs on your PC, and regardless of what format they are in, some code has to be executed to display them. I simply do not trust companies that design advertisements or ad networks to not be malicious. On the other hand, I'm fine with displaying all the dynamic content Tony wants to throw at me -- I trust him. I just don't trust the people he's doing business with (the ad networks).

Sorry, but my dislike for viewing ads isn't even in my list of objections. To summarize my post that way is a mischaracterization of my point.

To look at it another way, I would be 100.0% fine with advertisements on this site, IF all the following were true:

1. Advertisements were sandboxed in such a way that the security weaknesses, including information leakage, buffer overflow exploits, browser hijacking, etc. were impossible.
2. I had a truly unlimited internet connection and could download all the ads Tony throws at me without even a hint of throttling from my ISP.
3. All of my computers (on which I visit OH) were modern, up to date desktops or full-scale laptops with great performance capable of smoothly rendering animated ads in addition to the dynamic content on the page.
4. My workplace had no restrictions whatsoever on personal use of the corporate internet, and had exorbitant amounts of spare bandwidth capacity to just give away.
5. I were actively looking to buy new products and spend money on things like cars, mail-order brides, baseball memorabilia, or whatever else is being sold on these ad networks, and search engines didn't exist.
6. I were unemployed or dependent on others for my money, and thus unable to financially support the Hangout on my paycheck.

Note that none of these things have anything to do with the ads being annoying, or their appearance, or their content, except for (one could argue) the 5th point. It's not that I don't agree with your point; it's just that your objection ("I hate ads") is not really an issue for me. I have several reasons which are, in my view, more important and more objective, for wanting an ad-free Plus subscription.

I appreciate your support and understand your concerns. Thanks for taking the time to give your thoughts. At the end of the day, none of our advertising networks have been known to do anything but serve quality ads to their customers. Still, i understand your concerns and appreicate you having a plus membership.

[Tony-OH]

I'd be interested in a paid account that gets rid of the advertising. Much like many smartphone apps.

I'll look into it, but I'm not sure I can do that with our current model on all ads.