Would you opt-in to allow for CPU mining while visiting the forums for them to remain ad free?

[noel_fs]

depends how the load would be

 

[DRDNA]

If TPU Forum is in the following situation

BETWEEN THE LINES I READ IT ALL AS: The forum has become more expensive to maintain and TPU will now be FORCED to either use Ads or Mining to offset this cost increase. WE NEED TO DO ONE OR THE OTHER!!!

I would recommend that @W1zzard does both advertisements and mining and does it like this. First off everyone will be defaulted to "advertisements" and then members who would like to "OPT-IN" to mining to eliminate ADS can choose to do so by OPTING-IN. Any forum member who does NOT OPT-IN will see ADS. All GUEST WILL EITHER SEE ads OR WILL MINE depending on @W1zzard preference, this may not be what is perfect in a perfect world but its seems like the best choice for BOTH TPU FORUM and TPU Members! This solves both problems with a path that @W1zzard see's fit for this forum.

 

[EarthDog]

Id love to hear from W1z on this and if it is a thought to implement or just gathering metrics....

(Figured i wont have to say "at w1z" as he was called 3 times above me, lol!

 

[Aquinus]

BETWEEN THE LINES I READ IT ALL AS: The forum has become more expensive to maintain and TPU will now be FORCED to either use Ads or Mining to offset this cost increase. WE NEED TO DO ONE OR THE OTHER!!!

I now ask is the above read in between the lines statement true??????

That's what I've been wondering as well. What is the motivation to improve revenue? Is it because more money is required to operate or to provide more?

 

[lexluthermiester]

All GUEST WILL EITHER SEE ads OR WILL MINE depending on @W1zzard preference

That would scummy move and W1zzard is better than that. Besides, he's already stated that it would be an "opt-in" situation. Mining can, and will continue to be, easily blocked. He knows this fact.

 

[EarthDog]

DRDNA also described an opt-in situation for mining...

 

[DRDNA]

That would scummy move and W1zzard is better than that. Besides, he's already stated that it would be an "opt-in" situation. Mining can, and will continue to be, easily blocked. He knows this fact.

For forum MEMBERS the OPT-IN would be a choice but for GUEST W1zz could choose either ads or mining and scummy is just an opinion on some users part but if this is a financial issue for TPU Forum then a Forum must do what it can to stay competitive! No one has to stay if they dislike how a website is run.Besides GUEST offer the forum NOTHING EXCEPT COST TO THE SITE and if they want a choice in ads or mining they can become a member which does bring a value of its own as well.

 

[mouacyk]

heel na

 

[64K]

As I've already said I am for donating to a PayPal account anonymously for TPU support into the future. I just had a quick look at the Patreon site and it seems to be very successful in what it does with 150 million dollars going to content creators this year. I'm assuming that is after Patreon's average cut of 5% for providing the service and according to them the average pledge is $12. But one thing I'm not sure about is if you sign up to pledge to a creator then is that a recurring annual amount unless you cancel it or can you just make a one time donation like with PayPal? I would prefer to not use a payment method that is automatically recurring but that wouldn't stop me from contributing if that were the best option for a creator living in the EU.

 

[lexluthermiester]

For forum MEMBERS the OPT-IN would be a choice but for GUEST W1zz could choose either ads or mining and scummy is just an opinion on some users part but if this is a financial issue for TPU Forum then a Forum must do what it can to stay competitive! No one has to stay if they dislike how a website is run.Besides GUEST offer the forum NOTHING EXCEPT COST TO THE SITE and if they want a choice in ads or mining they can become a member which does bring a value of its own as well.

Don't think he's gonna do that, and if he does, he shouldn't be surprised if we block it.

 

[Tatty_Two]

Don't think he's gonna do that, and if he does, he shouldn't be surprised if we block it.

But they wouldn't block it if they opted In? Which I think is his point.

 

[lexluthermiester]

But they wouldn't block it if they opted In? Which I think is his point.

Opt-in for members logged in, sure. But...

All GUEST WILL EITHER SEE ads OR WILL MINE depending on @W1zzard preference

The above quote suggests that he meant that guests would have no choice. Thus my comment..

 

[Tatty_Two]

Opt-in for members logged in, sure. But...

The above quote suggests that he meant that guests would have no choice. Thus my comment..

Ahhhh OK, you used the term "we" so I assumed you meant the community and not a guest.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Ahhhh OK, you used the term "we" so I assumed you meant the community and not a guest.

No worries.

 

[Imsochobo]

We are curious about your thoughts on the subject, whether it would be a workable alternative to traditional advertising.

If you can do a javascript to check for chassistype (I do not know enough about javascript to know the possibility) and check if it's not laptop and limit it's cpu usage a lot i'd be sort of ok as a test
laptops are a nightmare on sites that mine while my desktops doesn't even notice it happening.

 

[XiGMAKiD]

I prefer non distracting ad

 

[NastyHabits]

I'd prefer ads. The ads I see on the front page are for products I am interested in and/or buy. I'm a senior citizen on fixed income, and to whatever extent mining would increase my electricity bill, it would not be welcome by me. (Live in an area with smart meters and tiered pricing. Going up a tier is a cost I'd rather not have.)

I understand the need for TPU to increase revenue. Extending the type of ads seen on the front page of TPU to the forums would not bother me at all.

 

[Peter1986C]

Well, mining may suspend your BOINC client, so possibly your power bill would remain about the same (boinc crunching out, mining crunching in). Principally, I still support your position though. After all, many do not crunch/fold and would see their power management evaporate.

 

[NastyHabits]

Well, mining may suspend your BOINC client, so possibly your power bill would remain about the same (boinc crunching out, mining crunching in). Principally, I still support your position though. After all, many do not crunch/fold and would see their power management evaporate.

Thanks for the reply. I have a separate PC that is dedicated for folding and crunching. (Rig #2 in my sig.) I run it at stock clocks just so I can avoid going to tier three electricity pricing. (Damn smartmeters!)

 

[AsRock]

Yep. And I'll gladly handle all that. But guess what... it's a lot of work, and if it is to be done right, that's a full-time job. That means I need full-time pay. I don't post as many reviews as I used to... because I have bills to pay and doing reviews doesn't pay enough to justify the time required. That why LTT has a youtube... they have to have it in order to generate income.

But I'll tell you what... he's likely also got that patreon account, too. That's just a small slice of the social media presence.






I look at it this way; if readers of TPU can't afford to each toss us 50 cents each over the length of the year... why even bother? If you understand the type of revenue I am hinting at I want to see...

As to trolls... It would never go that far, let me tell you that right now. If you know how patreon works, the things that are provided to donators remain on patreon. TPU wouldn't change one bit; but we'd need more content for that. You'd never get added privileges on TPU... maybe something by your name, but nothing more. There would me things like regular merch/hardware give-aways, done through patreon alone. several give-aways were done in the past few weeks... I got like 400 lbs of motherboard to get rid of....

Social media done right costs a fair bit of money. Anyone can google what it costs. if we don't have donators, how do we pay for that? If it was as simple as getting body in a chair and having them press buttons, everyone would be doing it.



Now, I'll not say that this is what W1zz has in mind. I cannot speak for him directly. But it is things like this that might be cause for need of additional revenue, and might have prompted W1zz to make this post. It's things like that that the money would go to... more staff. On the other hand W1zz might have posted this simply to see what people genuinely think about this subject, and it might not really be anything more than that.

But I'll readily agree that mining using users resources would not be the way to do it.

Thing about Patreon your not talking 50c, for each $1 it's a extra 38c. it soon adds up. So to give $1 it ends up being $1.38.

Not bursting of money here but not in for paying other than who earn it either.

 

[jboydgolfer]

I would guess that there is a decently sized group of active members who would have no problem doing this or another dedicated form of mining to generate revenue for the site. God knows we've given our time to better & grow the community , & I can't imagine why giving 10 or 20 percent of our CPU would matter for some in the scheme of things

I think that the devil is in the details as far as this matter goes ,because implementation is everything. I think the more information given to the users, the more likely you are to find people are actually happy to help.

I tend to leave the site open for around 12 hours a day give or take an hour or two, and I'd have no problem with that using up to 50 percent of my processing power.Hell I'll even bet that there's a few members who would do it full-time which would probably generate as much revenue as A thousand members doing it for a handful of minutes a week. I've benefited greatly From TPU & have no issues giving back as long as implementation is agreeable

i visit the site VERY regularly, and i know others do even more than i do....
& this is only a 1 year or less old OS & browser cache
if it was a single penny per visit that would be roughly $250USD.

 

[eidairaman1]

As long as it is not mandatory but optional it would be ok.

 

[bug]

I think most people voted "no" simply because the definition of mining is not clear. If we were to dedicate 1-2% of CPU time (or being assigned a small task per visit), I don't think we'd really have a problem with this; conversely, if mining tried to use 100% of CPU and GPU, that'll be totally unacceptable.

That said, access-based compensation is about the most fair type of compensation conceivable, so we should carefully consider this, as opposed to blindly voting "yes" or "no" just to make an ideological statement. Make an article about how would you go about implementing mining and end it with a request for comments maybe?

From a purely technical point if view, mining should be better than traditional advertisements not only because it doesn't eat into screen real estate (though perhaps a small indicator that/when mining is taking place would be nice), but because it doesn't require a bazillion other sites/CDNs to be responsive for a page to load in a timely manner.

 

[NastyHabits]

Changed my mind. Whatever is decided, I won't stop coming to TPU or use it less frequently. I'd even consider paying a small yearly fee. Love this place. Although I made my living as a tech, it taught me a ton of stuff about building my own PC.

 

[Ruru]

The ads on TPU are discrete and in no way annoying. If you want to use my CPU to mine though, I want the income.

Using other peoples hardware to create wealth (even if small amounts for site upkeep) is a stinking shit of an idea, no matter how trivial the consumption may be. Keep the ads. Hell, I've even clicked a few of them because they have been targeted well.

For me, that is simply just stealing if I wouldn't get the income which has used my PC's performance and I pay my electricity.

I'd rather pay for supporting the site via Paypal or something. Like I've spent over 100eur for supporting the Finnish hardware site IO-Tech.