When I first got on CC there always seemed to be a lot of activity on the various college majors threads or the colleges and universities threads. People would be asking a lot of questions and getting a lot of good advice and dialogue going. Other than the Parents thread and the college search thread (I never looked at the chance me thread) there doesn’t seem to be much interest in threads where people could potentially get some excellent information. Any idea why?
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It seems to me that the advertisements have been overbearing. I have an ad blocker on and yet about half the time there’s an ad popping up from the bottom of the page for about two inches.
The most recent re-do’s of the website, in recent years, were unhelpful in my opinion, though I don’t know about the ad revenue angle.
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This drives me bonkers, too. It is particularly intrusive when trying to respond to a thread since it blocks the response field almost entirely.
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There are no ads on my phone.
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No ads on my phone either.
But back to OP: I believe @CC_Sorin has said June through mid-August is a relatively quiet period here on CC. It’s post application season followed by summer vacations. Activity should pick up again in a few weeks when students start working on essays, short listing colleges, etc.
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I don’t have a problem with ads on any of my devices either.
As for traffic, it seems more HS students are on Reddit A2C than CC.
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Or on Discord.
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I don’t have a problem with ads at all. If you have problems with ads, I suggest messaging @CC_Jon and let him know what ads are causing problems. I can honestly say that the ads are almost unnoticeable to me these days, but I don’t use my phone to access CC so maybe that’s the issue for some people.
As someone who is here almost every day, I am pretty sure traffic has increased or held steady over the last year.
It’s summer and typically this is a slower time of year. If essay reader requests are anything to go by, there are definitely still students coming to CC, but yes, I think they are primarily on A2C or discord.
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I’m still having some issues with ads too. Especially on my phone. And sometimes if there is a pinned banner on the site, I can’t access my avatar on my phone to navigate to my alerts.
I also am still having trouble being re-directed to a new ad page if I click in the “wrong” spot. Currently it opens a new page to “r test - get your ACT scores in 40 minutes”.
I haven’t seen an ad on this site in a couple of years, and I do not have an ad blocker.
I agree things are slower now…but it’s also sort of between admission cycles and it’s summer.
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I also only access CC on my computer and I don’t have any ad problems. Before we had a Pi-Hole, I’d get unobtrusive banner ads at the top of the page on occasion. That didn’t bother me one bit. Now that we have Pi-Hole, I’ll get text ads sometimes that I barely notice. It sounds like the phone interface is more annoying than desktop.
Depending on device (e.g., desktop computer, vs. tablet, etc.) the ad placement is absolutely terrible and it takes “commitment” (and tech-savviness) to WANT to participate in this site.
Instead of using available (vertical) “tower” space on today’s “wide” desktop displays, to show non-intrusive ads left/right of the content area, or at least shortening the content area if they absolutely want to reserve horizontal banner space at the bottom of the screen - they are allowing overlay ads that obscure the content area, and even prevent pushing the “Reply to Thread” button.
The persistent yellow alerts on top of the page further shrink the usable content area.
It seems there hasn’t been sufficient U.I testing on the most common device sizes/orientations.
And to further drive home the point how poorly designed the layout is - there are 967 px in the client area, but much of it is wasted in gray space, banners, alerts, ads - so that there are only 442 px remaining for “meat”. The search result can barely fit THREE results on the screen - which is objectively (=frustratingly) terrible.
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Do you have an ad blocker installed? I haven’t seen an ad on my computer for a very long time (using macbook pro and chrome).
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Mods, should we move this ad related discussion to a separate thread? (I think we actually had one, but I can’t find it).
It’s an important discussion, especially if these ads are making it hard for users to engage with this platform. But the OP was not about ads.
I don’t employ ad blockers (for professional reasons) - I intentionally need to evaluate sites based on their “native” presentation.
So… my user experience intentionally matches those of any non-sophisticated end user who uses a shrink-wrap installation of their various operating systems/browsers. (And, actually, I find that very instructive 
)
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I use Brave on my phone and no ads. I don’t use a computer for CC.
When the ads are the reasons that people can’t possibly participate (post messages), then this directly relates to the OP’s assertion that posts “seem” down considerably.
The other issue is that the site appears stuck in client scripting at lot of times - making pages non-responsive for half a minute. Again - not on the latest 8-core high GHz PC with SAS drives of the typical web developer, who will also proudly proclaim how fast their JavaScript creation is – but the “real-world”, modest PC specs of your typical Mom & Pop (and worse: 6 years old technology that was already modest at time of purchase.)
People will drift off to more usable alternatives.
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No, since it can tie in with user experience.
What I will do is move the thread out of the parents forum and tag @cc_jon.
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Respectfully, I believe that is not the case.
I’m curious as to how people are having such different experiences. I don’t know enough about the tech aspect of devices, etc… There were big problems a couple of years ago with ads, which were largely resolved. Since then, there have been few reports.
I’ll link this here, because @CC_Jon explains in this post: