I've Had Enough & Today Everyone Has The Phoronix Premium Experience

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 7 April 2016 at 11:38 AM EDT. 123 Comments
PHORONIX
Notice something different about your viewing experience today of Phoronix...?

For the non-premium users, since yesterday afternoon you may have noticed some of the site pages showing up rather oddly or in cases of many Phoronix Forums threads not showing up at all. These issues have been due to a major advertiser network serving malformed ad tags since yesterday that end up breaking up both the main site layout and the forums content... Argh!

This is my main gripe is with web advertisements, not about seeing ads, but when an ad network can't even reliably serve ads! When they either have servers down or they accept ads into their network that aren't even valid snippets of HTML! It's their only job to serve ads and when many of them take ~50% cuts of the revenue, it's my biggest gripe is when they can't behave and just do their job.

After trying to get this issue resolved for several hours this morning, it still persists and has tripped my boiling point. That issue paired with being at the point well beyond burn out for an extended period of time, and not taking a full day off in more than three years of my 365 day per year, 100+ hour per week work schedule, I've had enough: for today at least, everyone has Phoronix Premium by default on the main site (with the forums it's not easy to globally enable premium by default there, so there I just removed enough ads where the pesky broken ads aren't breaking the site experience).

So everyone today has an ad-free experience, viewing featured/multi-page articles are now all rendered on a single page, and other benefits. It's what Phoronix Premium members get when subscribe for less than $3 USD per month or $150 for an entire lifetime. If you haven't joined premium in the 12 years that Phoronix has been around, give it a go. If you like it, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium. Meanwhile, I'm going to catch up on some much needed rest and evaluate new options (some explained below). I've already written seven articles before 10:00 today, so it's not exactly a day off, and chances are I'll be back to writing in a few hours.

If you want to see this ad-free experience for everyone continue, there will need to be more Phoronix Premium subscribers to join -- even though it's less than $3 USD per month, less than 1% of our readership subscribes! If you don't want to subscribe, you can always consider a PayPal tip or Bitcoin tip. Sadly, not many choose to support this site that publishes thousands of original articles per year and is the only place to find extensive Linux benchmarks, graphics driver news, and more. Please show your support.

If not many choose to take advantage of this opportunity to show their support, I'll be re-enabling the normal site in the morning (Friday) and hopefully by then the ad network issue is resolved... Or as I'm burned out enough, I may begin to explore making the site available to only paying premium members/tippers or other alternatives. Or I may explore other options like no longer being opposed to working for some company remotely along the same Linux performance/benchmarking lines (know of any positions, got any ideas? Let me know.) while just working on this site less but still definitely focusing on Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org commercialy. Long story short, nothing will happen to the site if you are Phoronix Premium member and nothing is changing with regard to Phoronix Test Suite, OpenBenchmarking.org, etc.

That's my burned out story and so once again if you want to show your support and help out while showing the ad alternative methods can be sustainable, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or alternatively a PayPal tip or Bitcoin tip.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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