1. Regarding ads, I don't find them obtrusive; except for the ones that are videos with audio that trigger in posts on a thread and are hard to find and shut down. If there's an easy way to screen out those out without it costing much it would be great. If not, no biggie.
2. As far as donations go:
a. Thanks to this thread I realized that I hadn't kicked in for this year yet. Now I have.
b. It's not all that easy to actually figure out how to donate on the site because the donations link is in tiny font surrounded by a bunch of other links in similar tiny font. I actually think that a big bright donation button might help get more of the non-donors to kick in.
c. Following up on
@cincibuck's point about not knowing what level of donation is typical or "appropriate", and without wanting to prescribe anything, if it's easy to do I think that displaying (with the donation button if possible), the percentage of members who actually donate (might backfire if it's too low), the average annual amount donated by those members (and maybe even the average monthly amount), might also be pretty helpful in getting non-donors to step up. E.g., Maybe a non-cheapskate guy who likes the site but only follows during football season and recruiting prime time and hasn't donated sees that the average monthly donation is $3, wants to beat that and kicks in $30 to do $5 a month for the six months from mid-August through mid-February in which he's paying attention.
d. Instead of just listing donors and biggest single donations, it might make sense to "honor" donors more like universities do with annual donation tiers. I might set them based on monthly measurements rather than annual ones to get more participation ($1 a month really doesn't sound like much to anyone IMO) but even $12 per year from a few hundred members would add up pretty quickly. Just thinking about it caused me to up my typical donation amount a little bit to hit a flat dollar amount per month.
e. I was looking for info. on how many total members BP has (didn't find it), but did notice that the site has picked up a dozen or so new members in the last month and I assume that number picks up a lot around the beginning of football season. When someone new signs up, do they get a welcome email? If so, maybe that's an opportunity to get them emotionally invested a bit by providing some tips for site navigation and culture (e.g., hi, here's the link to the "introduce yourself" thread), which might include a no-pressure explanation of the donation-based system. It seems to me (no data to back it up) that we've had less participation in the forums from new posters in recent years, and such an email might help in that regard too.
3. As far as the technical operation of the site goes, I join the chorus of those who fully support whatever you think is best (other than selling data to the Russian mob :cheers:)
