Do you love to read OSNews? Do you hate banner ads? Do you have slow internet access, or use a slow computer? Do you like to win free stuff? If you can answer yes to any of these questions, you should consider becoming an OSNews member. And if you sign up in the next three weeks, you’ll be eligible for several special members-only giveaways.We instituted the OSNews membership as a way for readers to support the site directly instead of passively through viewing advertisements. Many web sites solicit donations, but we decided that supporters should receive something in return. In exchange for a $20 yearly payment, OSNews members receive:
- Access to a simplified OSNews site with no banner ads.
- Eligibility for occasional product giveaway drawings for site members (usually books or high-tech gadgets).
- Special pricing on OSNews T-shirts or other merchandise, once we have it ready. (We’ve had it planned, but we need an Adobe Illustrator guru to help us before we’ll be ready to print it up. Contact us if you think you may be able to help.)
- And most importantly, the right to bitch and moan about OSNews content, functionality, or other gripes with just a little bit more authority.
This ad-free OSNews view has much faster load times than your average news web site (OSNews included). On average, modem users should see the ad-free OSNews load 5x faster than the regular site. Broadband users should see a 2x improvement. This is due mainly to the elimination of nested HTML table code (which dramatically speeds rendering time) and of course fewer graphics (from various servers around the Net) to load. If you’d like to see the ad-free OSNews in action, here’s a sample.
Most of the members that we’ve heard from over the past year have expressed their enjoyment of the ad-free site and their intention to re-subscribe for the coming year.
Today we’re starting our membership drive for 2005. If you sign up now, you’ll have access to membership privileges until 2006.
To get started, send your $20 to OSNews, along with your name and email address. (The email address you provide will only be used to let you know of new access information for the ad-free OSNews site and to announce prize giveaways. This email address will not be used for any other purposes and will not be sold or shown to anyone else.) You may send your money through Paypal. If you don’t have a Paypal account, you can get one through this link. If you already have a PayPal account, you may use this link to pay:
If you find that you can not use Paypal, you might also wish to try using Amazon.com’s payment system.
If you would like to mail a check or pay with some other method (including barter) or if you have any questions about the membership program please email me to discuss it.
Since the US dollar is so depressed these days, OSNews membership is more of a bargain than ever for many non-US OSNews readers! (less than €15!) But we recognize that there may be OSNews readers for whom $20 just isn’t possible, perhaps because of wage disparities in their countries, for example, but who still would like to support the site. In that case, email me and we’ll see what we can work out.
The fine print:
Currently, your browser must support cookies to view the ad-free OSNews site. We’ve confirmed that it works on the following browsers: IE, all Gecko/Mozilla-based, all Netscapes, iCab, Omniweb, Konqueror, Safari, Opera. Unfortunately, NetPositive on BeOS and Dillo do not work at this time.
If we decide to cancel the membership program for any reason, we will either refund each member’s money in its entirety or a pro-rated amount.
Currently, the OSNews Forum pages will not have the fast-loading, no-ad look, and might never have them. It all depends on how popular the membership program is, how difficult the redesign of the forum system is, and other factors.
Note to current members:
We initiated our membership program in June of 2003, so our initial members all received almost a year and a half of membership for their $20, since we decided that the calendar year would be a good time to start our newest drive. Your current access to the members-only site will end sometime within the next two weeks, unless you have been a member for less than a year.
In the comments section of this article, feel free to discuss your ideas for improving the membership program.
This is a pretty neat idea but the problem is I don’t have money to spend on a personal level. The ads really don’t bother me all that much either so for the time being I’ll deal with the banners. If money allows I may very well consider signing up.
% curl -s http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts > /etc/hosts
and be done with the lame ads.
As much as I enjoy reading OS News, it’s just not personally worth $20 a year. The speed difference is negligible even on dial-up. Also, who nowadays doesn’t have ad blocking capabilities, even though I currently don’t use one.
” Also, who nowadays doesn’t have ad blocking capabilities, even though I currently don’t use one.”
Blocking ads is trivial with adblock extension in firefox. the others things may or may not be relevant to readers but dont waste time concentrating on less ads as the feature
I like the lwn.net model of pushing out original content a week later. that might the thing to aim for. you can also give renumeration to authors who write those original content.
I would consider write atleast a few reviews if thats done
The original content on LWN.net is worth the money though. OSNews rarely has content that is worth paying for.
Since I’m sure most people on this site know what adblock is, that’s not really much incentive for forking over the 20 bones. However, if there were more functionality added to the site for paying visitors, such as the ability to filter what articles we see/don’t see, edit our posts, etc, you might get more takers.
As for me, I enjoy the site very much and I’d hate to lose it, but it’s a luxury I can live without.
> The speed difference is negligible even on dial-up.
This is *not* true. While it is hardly noticable on DSL/cable (about ~1 second of difference), it is *very* noticable on dial-up. We are talking here between 8 and 10 seconds of difference before the first readable block appears on your browser, when comparing the ad-free and ad-normal versions. I suggest you use a 56k dialup account and try out our demo.html and then try to load the normal version, and you should be able to establish the speed difference yourself.
i don’t really understand ?
do you have some editors ? do you produce any content by yourself ?
Strange idea.
You’ll help support the site. Sponsors don’t pay it all.
I wonder if OSNews would be interested in offering a discounted rate to those with .edu email addresses.
and haven’t had much problem loading OSNews site in my case. I don’t really think it is that slow on modem connection at all. especially to make people sign up just to load the site a bit faster. Not much sense IMHO. As someone told early, it would be better to have some niche functionalities before pushing interested people to sign up. Still I would like to sign up when my situation is better.
do you have some editors ? do you produce any content by yourself ?
Yes, they have editors. Yes, Eugenia, as well as other OSNews regular contributors, produce original content all the time. You must be thinking of Slashdork, which has no original content.
I know how tough it can be to make a profit which is not only the goal for this site, but for all people. I really enjoy this site and $20 is only… come on.. $20.
I like the site very much and I visit it everyday. I don’t ever click on the ads so I like the opportunity to support the site. $20 dollars for a year is a ridiculously low amount in my opinion, but then I do not have a problem supporting the linux distros that I use either.
I use Firefox’s RSS feature to follow OSNews, so that bookmarks take me directly to the articles. Does someone know if the RSS will take me directly to the ad-free articles? If the system works by cookies, that should be the case, correct?
>especially to make people sign up just to load the site a bit faster.
No, you are making it sound wrong. The fact that the site is faster on dialup with the ad-free version was a *by-product* of the ad-free version, NOT the target. We simply created the ad-free version back then with the whole purpose of not serve ads, and then *we realized* that it was actually much faster on dialup with this new layout, because it doesn’t have nested tables! It was a welcome surprise for both us and our subscribers!
I remember myself being in Greece last year and it was so much faster with the ad-free version on my brother’s 56k modem, because the tables will show up immediately, because they were not part of a bigger table!
> If the system works by cookies, that should be the case, correct?
Yes.
56k must mean differently in Greek. I use dial-ups sometimes and there is definitely not a significance speed difference (c’mon, 5x??!).
Same here, just send my 20$ with Amazon.com
Think about it, 20$ for a YEAR. Is that too much to ask? My god are you all that poor? Everything can’t be free…
Oh please, you all are the *rudest*, most ungreatful bunch of folks I’ve ever encountered online. This website is a nice collection of operating system related news and occasionally provides some interesting content of its own. The money to run it has to come from somewhere, and if you’ve been following the online advertising industry any in the last 5-7 years you’ll know that banners aren’t enough.
I’ll subscribe when articles are proof read and gramatically checked, and the site is standards compliant.
Since none of those things will ever happen, I’ll never subscribe…
I’m sick of seeing the news from Slashdot appear on here.
Why the hell would I pay $20 for that?
Think about it, 20$ for a YEAR. Is that too much to ask? My god are you all that poor?
Well, as it is, I pay $25 a year for Gamespot (which has a helluva lot more content than this), $10 a month for Safari, $10 a month for Usenet, etc. Honestly, I am stretched too thin as it is. I’d love to be able to financially contribute to all the websites I frequent, but I would have to get a second job – it’s just not possible.
Everything can’t be free…
Well, this site is ad-supported so it’s not technicall ‘free’
Oh please, you all are the *rudest*, most ungreatful bunch of folks I’ve ever encountered online.
How do you figure? I for one have never bitched about the content or anything else related to this site.
You need another idea. People need a bigger reason to give money, im sure you can think of something. I know we all have twenty dollars, but when its in my hand, how much do I want to give it to you. There must be something you can give me that I cant find somewhere else for twenty dollars.
Maybe you could kill two birds with one stone by making the forums for members only. So much of what is posted here is complete sh!t, and it is a damn shame since there are a lot of very good conversations here. Very few mega-trolls would bother to pay even the very modest fee you are suggesting. At the very least, you might want to consider requiring a login to join discussions. The freedom to post with any username seems to be too much for some folks here.
Oh, and people who block adds on add supported sites that do not shove pop-ups or pop-unders down their throats are a$$holes.
Quote: % curl -s http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts > /etc/hosts
and be done with the lame ads.
I just edited my etc/hosts file under OS X 10.3.6 (using emacs) and it works fine! I am donating anyways though just to support this site.
Hold on Guys Nothing comes for free, I am sure eugenia pays for hosting the website and working during weekends and even late nights. I am amazed at the speed with which the news changes here. Even sometimes at odd hours in the night I see the website updated. Re people accusing eugenia of copying slashdot, well slashdot may be good in content but their website design SUCKS big time. It still looks like an amateur student website with UGLY fonts and boring ICONS. Besides OSNews is just about OS’s and the comments are well moderated.
The forums have the best potential to provide value. However, with the anonymous posting that is in place, it just turns into flame wars and trolling.
It would actually be really cool of the forums required validated users with real names and profiles that actually let you know who the person is that is posting. It would help add some validity to what is said increasing the value.
I say this as I also hide behind an anon nick….
– Kelson
If I could block the people I do not wish to read comments from in certain article types (mac threads anyone) then it would be worth it so I could read the comments with out slogging through the flame fests which might also end because people can ignore those who they wish to not read and not get provoked leading to trolls and flamers leaving because they can not get a rise out of anyone.
banner ads are not enough unless you are Matt Drudge
Where do you login to then access the “ad-free” site?
How do you login?
But I don’t think bandwidth is.
Members will receive an email within 48 hours of signing up wherein they will be told how to log-in.
Why would I want to pay $20 for stories or articles
from websites I can read for free?
More than just stories and articles. There has Members’ Giveaway like last time was a book, “Solaris Systems Programming” by Rich Teer. It explains more above if you click ‘Read more’. I actually can’t believe that the real Rayiner Hashem just did troll in here.
I think, my $20 since June 2003 was worth and I just have paid another year.
People who are asking for where login is, it’s private link for member only to login.
There is some clown using ourhostingserver.com that is impersonating people. He did it last night on the Design Patterns thread and just did it impersonating Rayiner.
I know, I noticed. Banned.
I prefer it if I had to register to post here. With the option of having my email address visible to other readers.
>I prefer it if I had to register to post here
That was one of the ideas (the other was to allow both anonymous and logged in readers to comment), but it required full rewrite of the comment code, something that I was not willing to do, as I don’t have the time anymore.
It’s certainly NOT the prospect of no advertising that would lead me to contribute. I see no ads on OSNews. The special pages don’t thrill me either, as I don’t particularly want cookies. Shoot, most of the time I browse anonymously, and I have a pretty good idea of what sorts of information my browser divulges, and how to change it.
That said, I use my real name here. I sometimes contribute to threads. No, it’s not the unique content on the site, it’s the community and the discussion around the articles. OSNews does it rather well. Slashdot has something similar, but you have to jump through hoops, and the whole “karma” system is a bit much. Here people are allowed to post. If messages are out of place, we can flag them. Pretty easy for us readers, a bit of work behind the scenes.
I also might want to contribute because OSNews helped get me up to speed on Linux. That’s got to be worth something.
Hi Eugenia,
I have been an OSnews reader for over a year now, and I would like to support you. I access OSnews form many different locations, so cookies would not work for me. My question is: Can I just donate $20 by sending cash in an envelope? To what address? I want no membership or other goodies. I just want to keep visiting OSnews.
I love the discussions here also. I haven’t had trouble with trolling mind you. For the last five months, since I really learned of OS News, its part of my day. I turn on my computer, open my browser, choose from the pulldown menu, distrowatch, then osnews, then slashdot(just recently, maybe a week). I love the news, and discussion, If you had pay for forums, you would make money, but you would also lose new customers. Unless its available to read posts, but not reply. I think that would be good idea, readable but not postable.
I also agree that slashdot comments is like whola hoops, I actually think its worse. A complete waste of mousclicks!
The day that this site learns the difference between hearsay and journalism will be the day that people are willing to pay for it.
The day that an editorial board with real standing is established is the day when this site is worth something.
Additionally, the day that free speech is respected even when you do not like what it says, it will be the day that I support this site.
I have seen comments unfairly moderated simply because one of the editors did not agree with the opinion. I am all for moderating obvious trolls and people who spread outright lies or promote violence here.
Just my opinion.
All your tech news, including osnews.com at a glance:
http://glek.net/
I’ll pay when this site starts using XHTML & CSS, it would decrease the amount of code if used properly. And the site would load even faster.
Use tables for what it should be used for: tabular data – not layout.
Then, my friend, you will never pay. OSNews is designed to work even with the most weird browsers, on the most weird OSes. Why? Because we report on these OSes, and so it is our job to make sure we render on all these weird OSes and browsers, including mobile devices and embedded OSes. And therefore, this site will primarily remain -for many years to come-, a HTML 3.2 site (with workarounds for some browser bugs).
Howdy all
Everybody loves features and a great one would be to allow members to have a monopoly on their name (in the top of the post).
I for one would pay for this as there is nothing stopping anyone rubbishing my nice and well thought out alias with troll post after troll post.
This would be fairly easy to implement aswell a simple SQL command after submission or if the site is CPU bound hard code it (yes I know it`s nasty but this is the real word here, sometimes compromise is ugly).
Hell if you want I can send you the code to do it
as a student without a lot of money, I find it very hard to justify actually becoming a member of the site. As has been said many times over already, a great deal of your readers(including myself) block all the ads, so there isn’t much of an incentive there. Also being on a highspeed connection, the difference in speed between the adfree and plain free site is almost nonexistant. While I realize that it could be problematic to rewrite the code for the comment section in such a way that would give some of the advanced features users are looking for, I personally can’t be convinced to suscribe without them or some other true features of a membership.
Slashdot has a lot of other features that you could consider offering on the site, such as friends, enemys, stuff like that(which would present an easy way to later upgrade the forum code)…I believe slashdot members also get blogs and the ability to meta-moderate(no quite applicable to this site)..and slashdot offers all that for free. If osnews could find a way to offer some of those features and maybe a few of their own, I and many others I’m sure could be swayed into getting a membership.
Althought I don’t have the spare change, I really do enjoy the site, you guys are great, please keep at it!
Implement these, and my 20 dollars shall be yours:
– CommentRSS
– Email comments of posts I’ve submitted a comment to
– Threaded views of comments (i.e. comments on comments)
– Full articles via RSS, not just a teaser
1. Comment RSS: uneeded bandwidth waste.
2. Email comments of posts I’ve submitted a comment to : that would require a login process for you and everyone else.
3. Threaded views of comments: maybe.
4. Full articles via RSS, not just a teaser: that would also require login for the RSS feed.
Eugenia
Twenty dollars? Hur hur hur!
A shell account would be nice to start with.
A colleague of mine point me to osnews.com some months ago. Since then it became one of my favourite sites. I’ve learned much about the diversity of OS’s, downloaded most of the ISO to try them, and research some ideas. I don’t read much of the forums, but the news section is pretty cool.
Someone said that the site is not up to journalistic level. Well, english is not my mother’s language, so no problema for me and honestly I don’t care – I like the information served here – raw, cooked, with or without dressing… It’s not much, but it’s enough. That said I’ve put my money for it just because I love it, even though I’ve had my /etc/hosts tweaked from a long time (from that same site I think).
Hello David, I tried to reply to your e-mail but I get a «Delivery failed» = No mail from spammers
That’s a good system you have!!
“Think about it, 20$ for a YEAR. Is that too much to ask? My god are you all that poor?”
Uhm, yes. I live waaaay below the poverty line. While I would love to support OSNews as it is one of my favorite websites (read it everyday), being able to eat food is kind of a priority of mine.
Thanks for rubbing it in, by the way.
Email me, and I will pass along your message.
Okay, then you can at least make it HTML 3.2 compliant. You don’t even have a doctype.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.osne…
Quote : «Okay, then you can at least make it HTML 3.2 compliant. You don’t even have a doctype. »
Why do you need OSNews.com to be HTML 3.2 to pay? Does it hurt that much like it is now?
Does every browser from every OS (even weird one) support HTML 3.2?
I have said this many times: ONLY ask for HTML changes IF your browser does not render the page correctly. If your browser works, then your html requests won’t be heard. Things are the way they are now for a reason (e.g. going around browser bugs). If your browser works with the site though, you should not be even mentioning things like that!
“I wonder if OSNews would be interested in offering a discounted rate to those with .edu email addresses.”
Not all students have .edu email addresses. What about .ac.uk? Anyway, it sounds more likely to benefit researchers and lecturers to me.
An alternative way to attract students would be to just prevent subscriptions from being prohibitively expensive, or to offer cheaper subscriptions with fewer features to all those not inclined to spend much.
@Eugenia
‘OSNews is designed to work even with the most weird browsers, on the most weird OSes.’
My pet odd browser peeve with OSNews is that the ‘…or read all X comments in a single page’ option does not show up with lynx. Apart from that the site renders fine in text only – and you get to skip the ads without messing with your /etc/hosts.
I too think it’s a little bit mean to just block every advert from websites that don’t use annoying tricks like popup windows or those horrible DHTML/javascript/whateverTheyAre thingies that scroll an ad across the screen in front of the text.
I’m sure the ads on OSNews aren’t there just to look pretty. It’s a fairly popular site and it probably costs money to run, so denying Eugenia a little ad-revenue seems pretty unfair.
Anyway, on a more positive note… I enjoy OSNews a lot. The quality of the articles may be variable but they’re generally a lot more interesting than the stuff you find on Slashdot, IMHO, and the comments sections occasionally involve *positive* comments as well as negative ones (something that seems to be an alien concept to the grouches at Slashdot). Although, comparing OSNews and Slashdot is probably a little silly, as they’re different sites that’re designed to do different things – Slashdot’s more of a headline aggregator, whereas OSNews actually produces some original content.
I’m not able to afford it at the moment, but when my loan comes through next term I’ll probably sign up to support the site.
Just one suggestion: It might be worth taking a page out of Arstechnica’s book and instigating some sort of semi- ‘members-only’ BB forum. They’ve got a good community going there, and the ability to post across the entire forum rather than just bits of it does encourage one to sign up.
Eugenia has said over and over that she will never update or add to the code on this site, so we just have to keep watching the !!!! BUY VIAGRA!!!! in the forums, and wait for the possible 2-3 stories a day. I really only check the site for the overlooked OS info (Syl, Sky, AROS, etc) but for $10 I can get a car and driver mag sent to my house with tons of good reading. Even Slash doesn’t cost $20 and I get some goodies such as ‘see into the future’ maybe OSNews should offer something, because its not like it is hard to find another blog news site. (not that I want to, I like the OSNEWS, its just not worth paying for)
Some of you guys are just too much sometimes.
Here we have OSNews, you obviously find it worth visiting several times per day and, obviously, someone has to pay both dollars and time to have it stay that way.
The $20 they ask for is not ONLY for the simplified ad-less site and possibility of winning free giveaways – it’s called contributing and supporting something you like.
I almost went crazy when i saw you guys throw all the “Are you stupid, i’ve blocked all your ads anyway. And by the way, why don’t you write better stories/do it like ******.com/cover this&that OS better?” in their faces.
I’d like to see how much free work you guys would like to do, and for how long. If they were out for making huge bucks out of this site i’m sure they would have gone in a different direction than this, right?
The whole “hey, it’s on the internet, therefore i’m entitled to the contents and it’s my right to remove the ads”-idea is pretty silly to me. Sure, annoying ads should be exterminated from the face of this earth – but “well it’s up to me, everyone else runs MSIE and watches the damn ads, my page impression doesn’t count at all” thinking is just stupid, as long as it’s normal ads that are implemented into the design of the site to make sure the authors get the money they need to keep it running.
Not many complains about paying for a subscription of a physical magazine, and watching the ads in them. Bits & bytes costs money too.
I paid the $20…and frankly, nothing really came out of it. I mean, I got access to the paid for page, but it’s a pain to keep track of the username and password (because you don’t get to keep your own), and since I am always changing things around, I always end up losing it.
And sorry to say, I didn’t always get a response when I emailed regarding it.
If you’re asking for donations, that’s one thing.
If you’re asking people to pay for a service, that’s another thing. And when they pay for a service, expect people to have expectations. You can either 1) ignore potential customers, or 2) find new ways to improve yourself. IMO, the $20 I paid didn’t do much of anything for me. I didn’t get anything, and this new drive isn’t offering anything more.
The service has to have a value for the person buying into it.
What I like about OSNews is the fact that it’s open, everyone can post and everyone can submit news and articles. I find that something to cherish, and therefore the new operating systems/computing newssite me and Andrew run ( http://www.expert-zone.com ) also has the capability of commenting and submitting as anonymous.
Of course this also creates the danger of the obvious zealots and such, but I think the editors here are doing a great job– and I even think they can be more strict and harsh than they are currently.
However, I also will not pay 20E. Probably because I’m cheap, yes. And I don’t really care what others think about it. Other than that, I’m not sending money overseas to the US and I don’t have a credit card (I’d spend too much if I had).
On the other hand, maybe I’ll get over my fear of sending money overseas one day. If I do, I might reconsider.
Other than that: keep up the good work, OSNews!
So, you are saying that we don’t have the right to block certain sites?
Even if ads fell into good, and bad ones as you’ve described it, both do not contain much useful information to be pity about. So why not aswell remove them all (by tweaking /etc/host as a whole).
I’m all for sponsoring osnews, as I like it, but I that does not mean that I do like watching their ads, even if that helps them. Even if I want to do it, it’s not easy to setup any browser, any system, to watch ads from osnews only, but stop them anywhere else – the problem is that those ad-servers are used also by other sites (I guess, I don’t know for a fact) – and I don’t want by going to those other sites to see their ads, as it’s no longer my intention to sponsor them that way.
Marketing guys are smart, and they always come up with tricky ways of promoting their product. Probably they’ll find workaround, the same way I found workaround for them now. It’s like the weapon/armor industry. You produce better armor, now you need even better weapon.
– Threaded views of comments (i.e. comments on comments)
No, threaded views of comments is a NO NO!
It is a system that diverts the discussion from the topic of the main article to endless tiny subdiscussions, more often than not those being an exchange of insults and such.
Threaded comments are the best way to kill a conversation into Slashdot dorkiness.
Read this by Joel (from “Joel on software” fame):
Q. OK, but can’t you at least have branching? If someone gets off on a tangent, that should be its own branch which you can follow or go back to the main branch.
A. Branching is very logical to a programmer’s mind but it doesn’t correspond to the way conversations take place in the real world. Branched discussions are disjointed to follow and distracting. You know what I find distracting? When I’m trying to do something on my bank’s web site and the site is so slow I can’t remember what I’m doing from one click to the next. That reminds me of a joke. Three old ladies talking. Lady 1: “I’m so forgetful the other day I was on the steps to my apartment with a bag, and I couldn’t remember if I was taking out the trash or going upstairs with the groceries.” Lady 2: “I’m so forgetful I was in my car in the driveway and I couldn’t remember if I was coming home or going to shul.” Lady 3: “Thank God, I still have my memory, clear as a bell, knock on wood. (knock knock knock). Come in, door’s open!” Branching makes discussions get off track, and reading a thread that is branched is discombobulating and unnatural. Better to force people to start a new topic if they want to get off topic. Which reminds me…
I thought Eugenia did this all in her spare time, and that she recieved nothing(!) in return? At least, that was her excuse to insult people…
Do you love to read OSNews?
Yes.
Do you hate banner ads?
Depends. Google ones are often interesting – not to click on these, but it makes me wonder how good work they’re doing – ads match article content very well. OSNews ads do not disturb me.
Do you have slow internet access, or use a slow computer?
No.
Do you like to win free stuff?
No.
(Not happened yet
Well, I don’t see much reason to pay for this site. It would be reasonable, if OSNews built the closed member community – but in that case I wouldn’t read it anyway. Limiting access to members only has killed many useful/interesting sites, I hope OSNews will survive (and remain r/w for all).
And most importantly, the right to bitch and moan about OSNews content, functionality, or other gripes with just a little bit more authority.
Well, considering how I’ve been modded down in the past for politely expressing myself (Hi Eugenia!), I can’t foresee paying $20.00 for the right to openly “bitch” about the site. If you can’t listen to politely worded, constructive criticism, why should I believe that $20.00 would make you care any more than you currently do?
Interestingly enough, it was about a year ago when I began pointing out that Eugenias attitude and actions would only alienate more and more users, and in the last year, I’ve seen less actual conversation, and original articles than I have in the past. While it’s nice to know that I can predict such things fairly accurately, the lack of free speech, quality comments, and the lack of original content all mean that there’s less of a reason to visit this site.
Not that your site’s dying, but if you compare the quality and frequency of the comments, not to mention the increasing reliance on 3rd party articles, it’s certainly not growing in the way it was a year or more ago.
I certainly have my ideas about why this is happening, but the end result is that I don’t visit as often as I used to. I comment less, and I read others comments even less frequently due to the crap posts that people tend to leave these days.
On the positive side, the editors seem to modding down slightly less often (Hello again Eugenia!), but I think that’s largely due to the lack of comments being posted. If you were to mod down like the old days, the comments are would be pretty empty indeed!
So… Long story short is that I’ll pass on this opportunity to support your endeavors. If the quality increases, and the one-sided censorship doesn’t return with it, I’ll be more than happy to send you $20.00 (and perhaps more articles). For now though, what I predicted over a year ago is happening, and you’re now reaping the benefits of Eugenias reckless behavior with regards to others and their opinions.
I’ll subscribe the day that basic spell checking and grammar correction are done to the articles posted, and that the site is made standards compliant…
Since those things will never happen, I’ll never subscribe…
Is this fishing for new opportunity or are the advertising benefits not enough to cover the costs of running OS-news?
To answer your question, the money we make from advertising does cover the costs of running the site, as long as we don’t have to pay our volunteer contributors. If everyone who worked on the site were on salary, we’d be so far in the red we’d never see the light of day. The $20 amount was a quick, back-of-a-napkin estimate of how much revenue a very-frequent reader might generate in ad-traffic over the course of a year.
What a darn stupid idea. What original contents do osnews have? Do you guys have journalists, editors? A news sites like http://news.com.com would be a much better place to pay if at all. I never gave 20$ per year to hotmail to manage my emails then who the hell in the world will give osnews 20$ per year unless someone is overflowing with extra bucks.
I hope you guys don’t make it a pain in the …. to read for unpaid users or i will have to switch to another news site.
I think that’s not hard to understand.However i hope these probes don’t occur all to often in the nearby future.Would decrease the reading fun a little.
What original contents does osnews have? Do you guys have journalists, editors?
Personally i like the user interaction,in my opinion better then mailing lists.What’s better for a geek or enthusiast alike to debate ,anounce,rectify and sharing experiences?
I thought Eugenia did this all in her spare time, and that she recieved nothing(!) in return?
I manage the family finances (Eugenia is my wife), and I can tell you that Eugenia hasn’t seen a penny in the 3+ years that she has worked on OSnews. As part of her involvement at OSnews she has opportunities to do things that she wouldn’t do otherwise (trade shows, conferences, exotic review hardware) but never gets any money for it (and I wouldn’t want to deal with the legal consequences if she did – the risks for both of us aren’t worth it).
I just paypal’ed the lousy 20 bucks, which thanks to the dollars downward spiral isn’t much in DKK.
Even though I already block the ads (mostly because flashing stuff is affecting my tourette’s)
Eugenia, The point of my post is that trying to keep up with comments on OSNews is somewhat difficult, especially once the story falls off the main feed.
If you asked for donations…. as for your content… thy content sucks. Your content has been used to promote products that have sucked for the most part. The hunderd or so reviews all convienced me people use this site to SELL products through “reviews” than actually give a review… when is the last time you had a BAD review of linux??? obviously some information isnt checked.
Honestly, some of you folks sound so rude and uncivil. Even if you don’t wish to pay for the site, you can express your opinion in a friendly, diplomatic way. Or perhaps you can’t express yourself in such a way because you really don’t know any better. If you want to freely express yourself in an immature and juvenile manner then head over to Slashdot where I’m sure you’ll feel right at home.
I don’t see why people are getting so irate because OSNews is offering this option. They have said nothing about discontinuing the advertisement-enabled version of the site. If you don’t want to give them your $20 thats fine, but why do you feel the need to announce to the world your decision.
I myself am going to continue to use the site (free version) and click on the adds from time to time. OSNews deserves revenue for maintaining such a wonderfull website.
So if you don’t like OSNews go away (what are you doing here anyway?) or at least shut up.
On a side note, I do agree that there does seem to be some bias in the reviews towards certain products. I would greatly like to see this change (looks at euginia).
> when is the last time you had a BAD review of linux???
Read MY reviews.
The third party reviews are from normal osnews readers, who are mostly linux zealots. That doesn’t mean that they try to sell products, they are simply linux friends. However, *I* write things the way they are most of the time, I don’t care if it will hurt companies or products, I always review them for what they really worth.
So when are we supposed to receive the e-mail with intruction on how to login the NO adds OSNews.com ??
I’m a current subscriber and will gladly renew. My incentive is not so much the ad free browsing (I mosty use the pda page, and if not run privoxy), it is simply to express my support to the site and especially the osNews team which does such a good job.
My moral point of view: A site such as osNews needs to pay their bills too at some point, so if you use ad-blocking software like I do, subscribing seems to me like the right thing to do. Some other sites try to make you feel guilty for not paying – here they don’t and I like that.
It’s nice to see there are a few appreciative adults reading this site. I’m renewing today just to show my support.