Is this another joke?

I'm afraid not :(

Ads can be found on the site now...

Where can the ads be found? I've looked around and haven't seen anything new, especially any ads.

They are in 2 boxes on the right and between the news and new files.

Good. Then this means we're doing the ads right. ;-)

Oh... I found the "Ads" boxes on the right where the ads *would* be, but I have pagead2.googlesyndication.com set to 0.0.0.0 in my /etc/hosts file, so I don't see any ads anyway. :D

By the way, why are there two "Ads" boxes on the right (one between "Search" and "Survey", the other below "Top Downloads")?

Because two is better than one? The second one is at the very end, so it's not really taking up space (in the sense that we're not replacing something else.)

So what gets us $$, the number of page loads? The number of times people go to the links in the ad? When people buy something in the ad?

or is it a secret

I'm going to laugh when the border changes to red tomorrow. :)

On the other hand, I'll probably cry if it doesn't change to red ever. :(

It will not change to red.

We may end up taking the ads off again, but that doesn't make the news about the trial fake.

It's not April 1st.

A good thing that you could do is make it possible to turn off ads in the custom homepage feature.

This would work, but would probably be against regulation and wouldn't be applied.

Well, it wouldn't necessarily be against regulations, but rather it would defeat the purpose of having ads. :-)

I don't even usually look at ads, let alone click on them. Just not having them there wouldn't make much of a difference to me. If its not against any rules, i fully agree with having the option to turn them on or off.

I didn't even notice them. As long as we can keep our site, it seems reasonable to me.

I'm not so sure about that. Surely a good deal of the traffic to this site is generated by unregistered users. Also, I'm sure some users (like myself) would leave the ads on intentionally, and even more wouldn't even know there was an option to turn them off (even if it were posted in a news article, sometimes people suck at reading).

I know I used this site for about a year before I got an account. And I just skipped over the ad box, not even reading it. I assumed it was that "This is the opinion of ticalc.org visitors" box

The ones on the right don't bother me, The ones in between the news posts and other sections kinda do, But I can get use to it.

Hmmm some of the ad colors don't match the site well (its like a brighter blue), and then the green links. I liked how uniform the site was before.

As long as its text links Im fine with it.

That's a good point, and something I'm going to look into fixing.