SatelliteGuys Changes for May

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Scott Greczkowski

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Sep 7, 2003
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Hello and welcome to May! With the new month comes a number of changes here at SatelliteGuys, so I wanted to take a few moments and tell you all about them.

First up, I am so excited to announced that we have relaunched SatelliteGuys Radio! The NEW SatelliteGuys Radio features a new format we call "The 80's Wayback Time Machine" and features the best music from the 80's as well as member produced shows and specials!

Why the 80's? Well the 80's Channel on SiriusXM is SiriusXM's most popular channel. SatelliteGuys Radio features more music, and in my opinion sounds better then the SiriusXM Big 80's channel! Give it a listen yourself! Plus unlike SiriusXM you can also make requests via our website and have them played for you on SatelliteGuys Radio! Best part is SatelliteGuys Radio is FREE! In addition we have apps so you can listen on your iPhone, iPad, Android Device, Blackberry Device, Windows Phones and we even have our own Roku Channel!

It should be noted that all expenses for the new SatelliteGuys Radio have come out of my own pocket and NOT out of the SatelliteGuys Operation Fund. This includes our new radio automation software, StationPlayList. This new software allows us to do amazing things and gives us that real radio sound! In addition I have purchase a bunch or professionally made bumpers, sweepers and promos. This imaging we done by Jake and Dana Sommers who do work for real radio stations around the country! After you hear their work you will agree on how good their work has made SatelliteGuys Radio sound.

SatelliteGuys Radio gives our members another platform to express themselves, and with the new software we have the ability to broadcast live on a moments notice, so if major industry news breaks we can break into the music and report it. We also have the ability to host talk shows like we do for Satellite Nation. I have shown a number of friends who work in radio our new setup and I have been told what we have is better then what they have to use.

SatelliteGuys Radio is currently commercial free, but we do plan on adding up to 3 minutes of advertising an hour in the future. The reason for this is a station like this has a lot of expenses, we have to pay our streaming host for our streams, we have to pay licensing and royalties on all music we play, we have to pay to obtain our music and we need to pay for the on going updates to our imaging with new bumpers, sweepers and promos. When we do add commercials, they will be all lumped together so that you will have 57 minutes without commercials interruptions each hour.

Remember SatelliteGuys Radio is Listener Powered, so if you want to DJ on the 80's Wayback Time Machine or host your own show with your own music or do a talk show please let us know!

In other news SatelliteGuys has partnered with Panjo Marketplace to expand and upgrade our classified section here at SatelliteGuys! All members may now place ads in our classifieds section, the cost to do this is a $2.99 Listing Fee plus a 2.5% commision fee on the total sale. However if you are a supporting Pub Member the cost to place an ad i s FREE, there is no listing fee nor is there any commission fee! (Plus for the month of May we are waiving the $2.99 listing fee for all members!) For more details and a listing of many of the new features please CLICK HERE.

Starting today (May 1st) registered members will no longer be allowed to have a signature in their posts. This is now a Pub Member only feature. As a perk Pub Members are now allowed to post their referral information and codes for DISH and DIRECTV referrals! (For some DISH customers this could help you get a free iPad Mini!) We have run a script that was supposed to remove all the signatures from our registered members but it didn't get them all. SatelliteGuys staff will be removing signatures from non Pub Members as they see them.

Later today we will be launching a "Help Wanted" forum in our Installers Zone forum. In this forum companies seeking employees may post their ads in there. Note however the only members who will be able to post in that forum will be those who are supporting Pub Members. The costs of placing ads in other mediums is a lot higher than a one year Pub Membership... and in addition you know your ad is reaching your target audience. Ultimately we are helping you and you are helping us, thank you!

On to another topic and one I hate talking about and that is money. For registered members you might have noticed a small blue "Be A Pub Member" triangle in the lower right corner of your screen. In addition if you are a registered member and are using a Ad Blocker you might have noticed a scrolling nag asking you to please turn off your ad blocker or to become a Pub member. The reason for that is we pay for our bandwidth here at SatelliteGuys, and our site is hosted on our 3 dedicated servers which are located at what is considered one of America's Best hosts. In addition SatelliteGuys pays to use CDN servers so that static files such as images, java script and css files are served to you by one of 12 CDN servers located around the country. When you load these static files they come to you from the closest CDN server to your location. This helps speed up SatelliteGuys and makes it faster for you! Of course all of this comes at a price, and unfortunately our ad revenue is down almost 70% from this time last year yet our traffic has remained about the same.

Without trying to sound mean we run SatelliteGuys as a service to you, every time you visit us it costs us money and if you are using an ad blocker it robs us of revenue which we need to pay our bills. We get it.. we hate ads too! We have worked hard to make sure the ads you see as a logged in member do not slow down your SatelliteGuys Experience, that we show you safe ads, ads that don't refresh, ads that don't automatically play audio and we make sure we have no ads that have popups or popunders. Because of this we ask you to PLEASE consider disabling your ad blocker, or better yet become a SatelliteGuys Pub Member! If more people disabled their ad blockers then we could actually lower the number of ads we show. We are not in this to become millionaires, we are doing this because we love helping others with this amazing technology!

I have created a brand new webpage which explains to you all the benefits you get as a SatelliteGuys Pub Member, you can check it out at http://www.satelliteguys.us/index.php?pageid=pubinfo please take a moment and check it out.

If you have learned something or saved money because of SatelliteGuys then again please consider becoming a SatelliteGuys Pub Member!

As always if you have any suggestions on how we can make SatelliteGuys better we are all ears! SatelliteGuys was built on listening to our members! :)

Thank you for your time, your support and most importantly for being a member of SatelliteGuys!

Scott
 
Later today we will be launching a "Help Wanted" forum in our Installers Zone forum. In this forum companies seeking employees may post their ads in there. Note however the only members who will be able to post in that forum will be those who are supporting Pub Members.
That forum may need extra moderation.... I saw a thread recently from a guy looking for installers and he made the mistake of listing $$ info and got ripped on about it (too low, etc, etc). I can see both sides -- the installers don't want their rates to get driven down but if people are willing to do the work for the amount he'll pay, that's their business.
 
Might need to move to denying access when ad blockers are detected.


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I run an ad blocker but I have it disabled for satellite guys. I even click the banner ad at the top sometimes if it is a product I'm interested in even though there is almost 0 chance of me actually buying it. I assume ad clicks pay out more money than simply just seeing the ad.
 
Might need to move to denying access when ad blockers are detected.
I actually have a modification which will show you the first message in a thread, but the others are covered over and can not be seen until you turn off the ad blocker.

But I would rather not go that extreme. I understand why people use them. Many forget they are using them. As I said before I hate ads too! But to run a site this size they are a necessary evil.
 
I run an ad blocker but I have it disabled for satellite guys. I even click the banner ad at the top sometimes if it is a product I'm interested in even though there is almost 0 chance of me actually buying it. I assume ad clicks pay out more money than simply just seeing the ad.
Yup.. but I can't tell people to click ads.

What upsets my wife is she sees ads that she wants to click on because they are products she wants... but we are not allowed to click on on our own ads.
 
Might need to move to denying access when ad blockers are detected.
I'm confident that will not work. I suspect any user savvy enough to even install an add-on / extension to their web browser will simply move along to another site.... That's what I do, at least.
 
I'm confident that will not work. I suspect any user savvy enough to even install an add-on / extension to their web browser will simply move along to another site.... That's what I do, at least.

Some people may need to do that, that is up to them.

Although talking with other forum owners they are having the same issues so there might not be another place to go. It is a problem unfortunately. :(
 
I just thought of this one in response to Hall that better describes it...

Sometimes it is better if some folks do leave...

And what I mean by that is...

Think of it as the guy who always comes over you house and drinks all your beer.. but never brings a 6 pack of his own to share. Sometime you would be happy if he went and had a drink somewhere else.

What I said above might be good or might be dumb... I am sorry I got that head thing going around and am not feeling well. I felt fine up until around 11pm last night and I was working on all the changes and then boom it hit me... I didn't even finish all I wanted to finish last night. The only reason I came into work (yes work... SatelliteGuys is not my job) was so I could finish the things I was working on. Sorry if I am a little off today. :)
 
I actually have a modification which will show you the first message in a thread, but the others are covered over and can not be seen until you turn off the ad blocker.....

Good idea. I didn't know about that capability.
 
I'm confident that will not work. I suspect any user savvy enough to even install an add-on / extension to their web browser will simply move along to another site.... That's what I do, at least.

Any savvy user should realize that if the site can't keep the lights on, there won't be a site for them to use in the future. Our usage here has a cost and I don't have a problem with Scott implementing changes that will help defray that cost by those causing it.
 
Me neither. And Scott seems entirely up on his game today. Get well soon Scott!
 
I run Ad Blockers not to avoid annoyance, but to keep malware away from my machine. If the ad providers could guarantee 100% malware-free content, then sign them up! But they can't because the Internet is not secure the way it's implemented.
 
I like what you guys are doing here, when enough money enters my pockets I will gladly donate. :)
 
I've been getting my satellite news lately from you guys and after reading today's post, I noticed I had my ad-blocker turned on. I went ahead and turned it off. Thanks Scott for having a great place to share news and common interests for all of us!
 
I run Ad Blockers not to avoid annoyance, but to keep malware away from my machine. If the ad providers could guarantee 100% malware-free content, then sign them up! But they can't because the Internet is not secure the way it's implemented.

This use to be a big problem for us. I actually fired two ad agencies because of this (and we were making good money from them!) On the weekends they wouldn't monitor their network and Malware ads got in. We haven't had an issue with this for over a year and a half now. (Knock on wood!)

The ads members logged in see should be safe. I don't know of anyone who has gotten malware from a Google Adsense ad. Whats strange is I am looking and on my Firefox with Adblock Plus it is set to allow "some non intrusive advertising" and if I click on the show list I can see Google Adsense ads listed... but they are still not showing when they should.

BTW if a Pub Member wants to use an ad blocker here I have no problem with that. :) Just be aware that sometimes it blocks things it should not.

Make sure your ad blocker is NOT blocking the three following files.

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.9.0/build/connection/connection-min.js?v=422
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.9.0/build/yuiloader-dom-event/yuiloader-dom-event.js

All of those re used by the vBulletin software, and if they are blocked some features may not work, others may not work like they should.

Thanks everyone for your support and comments. I do appreciate them!
 
Off course all the discussion and satellite talk is great but pub membership for sure covers all the inside $$ Tips I have received over the years in regard to my dish service :)
 
This use to be a big problem for us. I actually fired two ad agencies because of this (and we were making good money from them!) On the weekends they wouldn't monitor their network and Malware ads got in. We haven't had an issue with this for over a year and a half now. (Knock on wood!)

The ads members logged in see should be safe. I don't know of anyone who has gotten malware from a Google Adsense ad. Whats strange is I am looking and on my Firefox with Adblock Plus it is set to allow "some non intrusive advertising" and if I click on the show list I can see Google Adsense ads listed... but they are still not showing when they should.

BTW if a Pub Member wants to use an ad blocker here I have no problem with that. :)
Okay, here's what I've now got for this site:
Screen Shot 2014-05-01 at 8.20.58 PM.png

We'll see how this goes. Thanks, Scott!

Edit: Ooo, my first new Ad: Our local Subaru dealer... TOO LATE!!! :D
 
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