Title
Give users back an ad-free LiveJournal.com experience
Short, concise description of the idea
Go back to the original promises of no-ads on LiveJournal.com
Stay advertisement free Full description of the idea
Back in the day, Brad tried ads and it was a bad idea because it slowed things down and annoyed users. (
link) When 6a bought LiveJournal, I and others worried about it - then the ads came, even though LJ maintained and still maintains to this day that "Paid users keep LiveJournal in business." (
link)
But there seems to be a number of problems keeping "ads" away from paid users and users who don't want to see it. My suggestion is to simply segregate the two classes of users.
Paid/Perm and Basic users log on to livejournal at:
http://www.livejournal.com/login.bml and view their own journals and other urls at username.livejournal.com.
Sponsored/Plus users log on to livejournal at:
http://sponsored-paid-ad-something.livejournal.com/login.bml and view their own journals and urls at
http://sponsored-paid-ad-something.livejournal.com/users/username.
An ordered list of benefits
- The teams that propose code changes have a way to clearly delineate requests as "sponsored" or not, and can ensure, clearly, that advertising related changes won't be made to P/P/B account views.
- The teams that make code changes have a way to clearly code and check in code that is for "sponsored" users/infrastructure and "ad free" users/infrastructure.
- The teams that review the code changes can run their test cases in "sponsored" and "ad free" modes.
- Perm, paid, and basic users no longer see ads at livejournal.com - just as promised back in the day.
- Maybe some paid users come back because they won't see ads and it's easier to not repeat Pepsi-spam-gate.
- Plus/Sponsored accounts will see the ads they signed up for, and get the benefits they signed up for.
- 6a starts the long haul of earning back some of the good-will-capital they've been burning through.
An ordered list of problems/issues involved
- Easier for Adblock Plus users to block ads when they view http://sponsored-paid-ad-something.livejournal.com/users/username.
- Requires implementation of processes such as Feature Teams, Code Proposals, Requests for Comment, Business Cases, Code Review Teams.
- Might be a bit harder to track what you're still open-sourcing.
- Might lose some face in back tracking on the back tracking of "no ads".
- Confuse users.
- Lose ad revenue from basic users.
An organized list, or a few short paragraphs detailing suggestions for implementation
Build a Features Review team. Build a Code Review team. Set up processes for suggestions (like I'm doing now) and a comment period, formal sign offs - the whole thing to port this to reality. Everything else is pretty heavily outlined above.
Oh, and I know you rely quite heavily on volunteer hours to keep this running - why not have user input on the FR and CR teams?