Just a quick note to all - we've had to take down the snail mail donations as well for a bit. It listed sending checks made out to "Enlighten" (the legal entity owned by johnboy and handling the banking for enlighten, pillreports, and bluelight). However, in the process of separating johnboy and enlighten from bluelight, we obviously can't ask him to still be processing checks on our behalf. We expect to have our own legal entity in place in April, at which point we can re-establish both online donations as well as a name to send checks to via snail mail. We appreciate your patience with us in this regard.
Enter an idea I have heard about before of opt-in advertisements. Similar to how we currently advertise taking surveys and such we can offer an option which if selected activates a banner or sidebar of ads. There is a big difference between guests coming to the site and being pelted with popups and flash html tags, and registered users choosing to give back to the site by turning ads on.
Just a thought on how we could make some money by users choosing to give up a little bit of their screen space. I don't know if there is some other reason/policy we don't have ads that would make this idea moot, but thought I would throw it out there anyways.
Any ideas are welcome, so thank you. It is a fairly special thing for our site not to have annoying or ugly adds all over the place, it lends power tot he few banners and forum header notices we put up from time to time because they are the select few. The concept of 'opt-in' advertising is a good one, in that it allows those who care to help in this manner to turn them on and subject themselves to this annoyance while helping the site financially. I'll relay this to the list of options the admin continue to evaluate. The negatives I can see at this point would be the implementation (technically should be easy, but not something we've done so it's new for us to turn on and implement; ethically this could be harder in that we get so many 'vendors' wanting to advertise here and we say no as it conflicts with our 'sourcing' rules which keep the site and members safe as well as not wanting to give the impression we support or endorse a vendor when we have no control over what they may actually sell week to week
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
). Still, this suggestion is a fairly passive one to generate money, and being "opt-in" would not hurt the site's current presentation to n00bs and lurkers
One subject akin to this is that the admin have discussed changing the profile fields a bit and creating an "opt-in" for surveys with researcher's we've partnered with. Suppose Inflexxion needed a study with respondents in a certain demographic (age, region, etc). We could shuffle our profile fields a bit, create an "opt-in" for our members such that if they meet the criteria we have their permission to PM them and get them to take the survey and help out BL funding this way. Right now, we're leaning heavily on tweets, banners, DRUG STUDIES thread, and other more shotgun approach gathering of respondents for such a survey. With an "opt-in" by the members, they would only be contacted if they
chose to allow us to contact them AND they fit the criteria.
We'll still rely on the banners and threads and tweets, but this "opt-in" group for surveys might allow us to get a much quicker meeting of the required number of respondents, and we wouldn't have to carry such banners for extended periods of time. It's a thought, and we'd appreciate anyone's feedback on this concept as well.
and
