This forum now is not such a smalll one anymore. It is getting about 500,000 to 600,000 hits peryear and growing very rapidly, with new members joining every week. It is very much an Orthodx Catholic site, concentrating on the spiritual on prayer, the sacraments , devotion to Our Blessed Lady , loyalty to the Holy Father, the Teachings of the Church and so on. As such the devil and the enemies of the Church hate it and will hate it more and more as it grows. THe bigger it gets the more it will become a target of the enemies of the Faith and God. Just as the Faith and and God are under attack in every Nation in the world. But in a special way on the internet. Please remebr this little forum in your prayers that it be kept safe so that God may bring forth fruits of holiness from its continuos internet life, most especially at Mass. Without such prayers nothing Catholic will long survive its enemies. i have been praying about ways to get advertisements removed from the forum (some of them offensive as you know} and the only way to do this is to get it tranferred by an IT expert to a privately owned space. So I am going to start saving money and looking round to find an expert team to do so. Please pray that this works out. God bless, Padraig,
1Thess 5:16 Rejoice always, 17 pray constantly, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. 19 Do not quench the Spirit, 20 do not despise prophesying, 21 but test everything; hold fast what is good! V.24 He who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.
I think that was the quickest answer to pray I have recieved in my life! Itws appears some IT folks in the USA( Ohio) and Ireland may be stepping in to help! Incredible!! :shock: I am very happy. May God reward them> Thank you all for your prayers; some of you must be very,very good at them.... :wink: By the way the server for this forum is in the USA (free forums) and I am in Ireland; if that helps.
I dont get advertisements when I see this site. Why? I use Firefox and an add-on called 'no script'. Kaboshes all ads. Keeps your cost down. Most of the other browser have similar things going for them. Going down the road towards IT support can get very expensive, not to mention much of the Forum software is a target by hackers changing/deleting content. If this site has been performing well for X numbers of years, no headaches, minor down times even when mayhem has been occurring, you may want to consider that whether someone receives advertisements or not is their responsibility. Instruct them how with various browsers with sticky threads on how to tune out the ads. Keeps your cost down. The road toward hosting your own forum can get expensive and very troublesome without the owner having IT experience himself. We all live in the world, but hopefully not of the world. I personally dont see any reason to expand costs and trouble down the road to keep the world out. Especially when its so easy to pass it on to the user, very easy and do-able. As a consideration, Phpbb forums are free also, this one is amongst the most configurable and utilitarian and there is free hosting and maintenance through http://www.makeforum.org/ . Of course with the helping hand(hopefully not contractor$$ looking for a client specifically) you've been offered it would be wise to consider the options. Costs as the site grows options, and how ad-supported hosting can contain your costs(hosting, bandwidth and response to mayhem) as your site grows. But once again, instruction on how individual users can eliminate ads will be the key to lowering your hosting and bandwidth and even maintenance(mayhem) costs.
Thanks RB2 for the info on 'no scripts', I just downloaded it. We have a business website where they give you one free domain and it costs $5.95 per month. I have a ton of memory and so far 3 websites for that cost. You pay $10 per year for each additional domain name. So if you need to pay, it is one I recommend: http://www.hostmonster.com/ I would think the main problem would be maintaining the history of the chat room.
The no-script add on works great. It takes a bit of a learning curve that can be best summarized(mostly) by allowing scripts at the bottom of the list to run before scripts/sites appearing higher up until you can get a full presentation of the webpage without ads. Of course this kind of tweaking need only occur once with each new site. Obviously one doesnt allow googleadservices.com to run along with a few other notables. On this site it is googleadservices.com, quantserve.com
I agree with RB2 that we cannot shut out the world, nor do we need to, and that we should take advantage of the most cost-effecitve way to handle the forum. However, also it must be safe from deletion and abrupt closing. A free site is at the will of those who run it and its advertisers and it can be closed down at any time. I lost a very intensive set of web pages that I made for "free" on Netscape way back when it was a good place to make personal web pages. Just like that they were gone. I almost never see advertisements - and I use Internet Explorer! I don't recall doing anything to remove them but yet I don't have them. Maybe it's my angel at the helm! LOL Seriously I don't see them.
Here in the U.S. we already have to put up with condom ads and contraceptive pills being advertised on TV. Cant' imagine anywhere in Ireland or Europe is any better. Yet we dont stop watching TV or pay for more expensive alternatives. I hardly see where internet ads, which are predominantly keyed to common words occurring in the forums and/or to the viewing habits of the user are something to be judiciously avoided through $$ expenditures rather than using the tools out there to protect ourselves. Just my 2 cents, and the only two cents you'll get out of me!
Thanks. I rarely see adds, certainly never any pop ups when I tour the web. It's just a matter of putting in blockers. Thanks all. That was certainly a prayer answered fast and well.
