All,
I hoped the day would not come but it has, and before you unleash a hate storm, please understand that I didn't make this decision lightly or in haste.
NA has been open since 2006, mostly ad-free since the beginning. I say mostly because we had "cornerstone" ads a few years back that were from folks in our community, like RetroZone. Our membership has grown a lot and so have the costs over the years (part of those costs include the cost of upkeep and time maintaining the massive amount of data we have now).
Patreon has helped keep a stream of income that helps with a portion of the monthly costs, but it's been in steady decline since the beginning, as I suspected it would. Thanks to all the folks that have helped, month after month, since the beginning -- don't think I don't know who you are, I do, and I thank you for the continued support you've given.
Instead of running donation drives or other panhandling efforts, I think I'm going to try ads on a few pages to see if it can help a bit. I'm going to leave the forum pages for last, only as a last resort. For now, I'm going to put a few ads on game listing pages, and perhaps the inbox. I plan on rolling these out slowly, carefully watching and listening to feedback -- your opinion matters, even if it's negative.
I can almost promise you that other sites that get 1-4+ million hits a month (which NA does!), have ads all over the place. I'm wanting to do it slowly.
If you use ad-blockers, I understand -- I do too. But consider this: if our only revenue streams keep drying up, NA will close. That said, reconsider this stance, at least on our site, if you want to keep it alive.
-Dain