So I haven’t really spoken up with my two cents about this. Being as VersoBit has been hosting, and supporting Fellowsfilm for well over 5 years now...
I have spent a meticulous amount of time ensuring Fellowsfilm has an extremely cost effective server stack. This has never been a cheap affair for Fellowsfilm, cause long behold - you guys store a lot of content, upload a lot of photos, and fill a database faster than most communities do... at an unbelievable rate.
Both fortunately and unfortunately for us, this means that things rapidly change with infrastructure. Over the last five years Fellowsfilm has grown from delivering less than 1Tb on a 75mbps connection to pushing out close to 100Tb in popular months on a distributed multi-server setup.
Even as I type this, our current traffic levels are delivering an average of 400mbps across three servers behind a load balancer.
While our current setup allows us to save money by using less powerful servers for our average traffic, it allows us to scale out and up - meaning if we have a large burst in traffic we can quickly handle that burst without interrupting the website for everyone while maintaining affordability.
Tl;dr Fellowsfilms bandwidth is insane and impossible to keep up to without modern server infrastructure, which unfortunately comes at a price.
Ensuring that our archive of mods is well curated and always available has been one of our ongoing goals since
@Tom got me involved, something which I’m proud to maintain to this day.
When Fellowsfilm started growing rapidly, we had to make changes to our goals to ensure that we could maintain our original goal. Unfortunately for us, this means Infrastructure is always going to be our core cost. Thankfully we have an amazing team of Administrators, Leaders, Mods, and Content Controllers who volunteer their time as their passion matches ours; this reduces our operating costs significantly allowing us to balance our revenue between building the community further, with software development (the forums), and modern servers to deliver the website you know and love.
Even though we have balance in our monthly costs, we meticulously budget our assets and revenue generation streams to make sure that we are able to maintain enough revenue every month to allow us to prosper.
We started noticing a dip in our revenue which was causing us to see some red flags immediately, through research we deemed that we should show a red banner to alert users they may be using an AdBlocker that prevents Fellowsfilm from earning it’s operational costs. After many months of displaying this banner, it had no effect. We made the elective decision with our Ad Partners to implement a soft wall to prevent users who don’t participate fairly from accessing our most popular and cost eating features. (In this case Downloads).
While I advocate for Ad Blocking, because I know a lot of publishers go overboard with advertisement placement, we are advocating an approach that displays ads at a less frequent rate to users who participate fairly on Fellowsfilm. Our goal with advertising is to ensure we use premium ad traffic. This means no pop ups, no timer based ad walls (wait 30 minutes and view this ad before you can download), etc.
I understand that you want to enjoy your content and not be disturbed by advertisements, but unfortunately by blocking ads, you are unfairly expecting people like me and every other user on here who pays for the forums servers fairly, to cover your access.
And I’ll be blunt here, I have spent thousands of dollars out of my own pocket, expecting none of it back, to keep Fellowsfilm operational in it’s short falls (from it’s early days to now).
My message is pretty clear here, If you don’t want to subscribe to remove ads fairly, or browse the site without an adblocker. You will be prevented from accessing Downloads.... don’t like it?
I’m sure you can find somewhere else to download things.
I’m not going to tolerate any further bickering relating to this topic, it has gone on long enough.
I hope everyone is having a fantastic day, and I’m really sorry that this kind of thread even has to exist on the forum.