Gulch wins at Zuda!

I've disabled the eye-hurty ads! Yay! :-)

I know people have complained about the blinky, eye-hurty ads in the past, and I'm truly sorry for them. Just trying to eat, you know?
;-)

Most of you know that the ads on BCK buy a fair chunk of our groceries. (Not THAT big a chunk these days, and frankly, more goes to pay for server expenses now that we've upgraded things a bit.) That being the case, I've pretty much accepted whatever Casale tossed our way, in an effort to make ends meet. (I'm not complaining about Casale Media, by the way, nor the plethora of ad campaigns they give us the option of running. I just maybe wasn't selective enough in approving things.)

With the absolutely amazing support from you people, I figured the least I could do was go in and deactivate the more eye-hurty, blinky ads. I'm sure a few will still slip through, but hey--At least they should be cut down to a minimum.

I admit I thought about it first, because most of the eye-hurty ones are part of larger campaigns, and opting out of the eye-hurty stuff means opting out of the entire campaign and those are sometimes some of the better paying ads. But frankly, the ads don't pay that much, and it just isn't worth giving our readers eyes strain.

Plus, the way you guys pitch in whenever we have a crisis, I figure it's the least I can do to show our appreciation to those read and support the comic even if they didn't opt-in for the "ads-free" thing. Frankly, I think that most of those who opted in on that did so more to support us than to get rid of the ads, anyway. Which is mighy nice of them.

(And I've said this before, but if you've kicked in fifteen or more in the past, even if it was two years ago and it wasn't all at once, send me your username and the email address from which you "tipped the cartoonists," and I'll hook you up with the ad-free bit, as well.)

So thanks, guys. We have some pretty rockin' fans and friends, and I hope your eyes will feel better without so many flashy hurty things glaring at them.

Banning ads from Circuit City

Also, while I was perusing the ad campaigns, I realized that we were running Circuit City ads. See, the way things work with most of these ad companies, you're running a whole lot of campaigns from a whole lot of advertisers at once, and frankly, it is easiest to just set things to auto-approve new campaigns.

The thing is, though, I can't let Circuit City run ads here. I know it isn't illegal, but firing tens of thousands of your most highly paid workers so you can replace them with newbies to save money is definitely not cool.

I'm not crusading or anything, just venting. You may disagree about whether what they're doing is wrong, and that's okay. I, though, cannot take their money and feel okay about it.

So why am I even writing this? Just wanted to let it out, I guess, while I wait for Shan to finish tomorrow's inks (which I'll be coloring) and take a break from setting up sites for a couple of new webcomics we're going to be hosting for people at LawrenceHost.

Thanks for listening.

--Rob
"I may not be a furry, but at least I'm a furry enabler"
:-D