Some time in the next month you will begin to see advertisements appear on the forum and I wanted to explain why.

I have this forum hosted by www.freeforums.org. When I originally signed up with them, you got a free forum with no advertisements. That was their big feature to get people to use them, no ads.

Since that time, they have decided to make advertisements on all forums mandatory (like most free hosting sites), but did have an option to purchase "ad removal" for a monthly fee.

As a service to the forum users, I've been paying the monthly "ad removal" fee to keep the site clutter free and sometimes those ads are just annoying to people.

As of late, while the site traffic has been good, the participation of registered members has dropped off. This is understandable as new things tend to attract attention for a while and people move on to other new things. As participation drops, it doesn't encourage others to participate more.

New forums often takes months to years to become known and full of activity. Since the forum is dedicated to a, lets face it, rather unknown country, then the likelihood that it will ever become super busy is fairly low to begin with. But my intention was never about any kind of commercial success. It's just something I've wanted to do and I'm finding it fun to host this forum.

However, due to the low participation by registered members I no longer feel the need to continue paying a monthly fee to keep the site advertisement free. If the site becomes busy once again in the future and I get a lot of negative feedback about the ads, I can always have them removed at that time. Really, though, I think most folks are used to seeing ads on almost every website they visit and know how to ignore them, so I doubt it will really be that big of a deal.

Thanks,
Alex
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"As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children." ~John Adams