Page 2 - No thread adverts for me :)

You need to realize that most (all?) of Developer Shed is ad-supported. That's why Jcaputo and the other admins can provide these forums, tutorials, and other community services at no charge with such high reliability and support. If you block the ads, then you're decreasing the revenue and potential profit of the people who run Developer Shed. If too many people start blocking DS's ads, then it may simply shut down or stop its free services because of what could be very large economic losses (multiple vBulletin licenses, hosting/bandwidth, domain registration, DNS, server hardware, etc. amount in total to a what can be a surprisingly large cost I would think).

Personally, the ads are unobtrusive, well-placed, undistracting, and don't seem to slow down the page loading at all, so I see no harm in them. In fact, by letting the ads through, you're personally contributing to the overall health and well-being of this and other communites that DS runs. If huge flashing blinky ads start appearing in the middle of every page for no apparent reason or I start seeing pop-ups or whatnot, then I'll be unhappy.

All very true and very accurate.

Oh C'mon... I hardly consider the massive "Is your site reaching it full potential? Buy our even more expensive dedicated hosting today!" big red flashing adverts "non-obtrusive".

Besides, virtually all adverts are for american companies and products that I wouldn't buy anyway.

In that case Phoenix let me re-adjust my entire marketing campaign so that no ads are allowed to be animated, and no ads are allowed to be web hosting relaed. While you are at it please give me a list of advertisers you would PRE APPROVE and I will only sell advertising to those companies.

Very well... GoogleAds

Their text-based adverts are more relevant, aren't irrating, and are just "perfect" as far as I'm concerned.

As for "animated ads", don't get me started on how irritating those are, when a site has those on, it gives me even less incentive to click on them, pondering "how low can they go?"

Sorry for being so anal about it, but there are "surfer-friendly" ways of doing advertisements, and having big, obtrusive, flashing adverts isn't one of them.

In fact, a recent study showed that web-surfers are more likely to ignore flashing or animated adverts. ( http://www.directoryone.com/articles/blind-banner-ads.html )

So it would probably be in your best interests to have text-based adverts anyway.

Ill run my business and you run yours.