Starting this week FTE will be making a change to our forum sponsorship model as a 30 day test.

Currently, we "backfill" forum ad space not purchased by our sponsors with ads by Google. Although Google ads are highly targeted, they've never been what we believe to be an optimal solution for forums. To be effective in forums they take space on the left and rotate between 3 positions with posts (left, under the first post and under the last post).

For a 30 day period we're going to incorporate intelligent text linking in the forums in place of the Google ads. The new targetted text marking program will link certain words automatically in a manner similar to the current blue hotlinked keywords users have seen at FTE for nearly 2 years. Hopefully users will find this to be more useful, targetted to what they are seeking, faster, and less intrusive (sorry, but we can't get rid of ads altogether, have to pay the bills).

Under the new system some words will appear green and will be clickable which pulls up an information box.

Thank you for supporting FTE.

 

Great news, looks like it could be a good mixture to meet the wants & needs of all.
Thanks for the info.

 

Ken I like the idea but is there someway to make them different the double underline can sometimes make posts hard to read. I can't really explain it better than that but I have run into a couple of places where these underlined words just for some reason really interfered with reading the post.
Sorry I don't have a good suggestion other than that, and is just a question maybe just the different color like the blue words were or something along those lines.

 

I dont know about most users, but i know when i am surfing the forums, i am not shopping. I am looking for useful information

 

I know these site need income. I, as you, don't click on banners, period! If I want something, I'll look for it myself. All these banners on sites winking, blinking and flashing irritate the heck out of me. But I have to tolerate them to get the information from the boards that I'm looking for.

 

I do understand the need for FTE to function as a business and operate as such, but this double underline of *hit words* is a bit irritating. I'm finding that I have to modify words to get around this. For example, fuel pump now = f-uel pump. Wasn't one of the benefits of being a premium member to no have to look at the advertising?

 

Those little links in the text are a pain in the butt. Everytime you move the mouse to do anything, you get these silly pop-ups that I have no interest in at all. All those do is make me NOT want to buy through them. I too look for the info, if I want shop, I already have my favorite places.

I thought part of the membership was reduced / no ads. Those links are annoying.

 

These underlined links were not supposed to appear for Club FTE members. It was a bit of code that apparently didn't get properly tested and I'll correct it today.

To non-Club FTE members, there is graphic at the top of the forums for joining, and also in your User CP under the subscriptions section.