Ragns

If you've been to DeviantArt recently this is what the site looks like to most people recently.

As an admin of a site that eats up to 60 TB of bandwidth per month I go out of my way to support the sites I check frequently. I don't use any ad blockers and only use StevenBlack hosts file to make sure to get the most dangerous malware out of the way. I even whitelist safe ads like Google Adsense and Project Wonderful because most of their ads are funny.

Sonomaa and I worked many years to lower the operating costs of BG Forums as much as possible and we still feel bad that 97% of our bandwidth bill is wasted on lurkers that don't contribute to the website. I'm still not ready to penalize lurkers but the cost associated with them is real. I hope that it's no secret to anyone that the money we make from the yearly rafflecopter goes to keep the servers alive for lurkers. At least I can still manage to have a few hours of sleep whenever Slycer post an article that gets reposted on Reddit.

I'm hoping that if someday we have to do shitty gimmicks to make people stop using ad blockers that the BG community won't be afraid to yell at me.

Meanwhile here's a screenshot of BG Forums without an ad blocker.