hey all - i wanted to post some of my thoughts on some of the recent changes on DS, and rather than blast them out to everyone via the "doug" profile, i thought i'd post them here and i kindly ask you to forward this entry to anyone whom you think might care.as you've probably noticed, we made some changes to the site a few days ago. we're constantly working on new features and trying to improve things, and this latest "release" included a few new things. our brilliant tech team made our discussion boards much faster, and we cleaned up alot of little oddities that were happening for folks using different web browsers.we also made a change that many of you noticed - we moved advertising on a few of our pages (specifically, the Community discussion boards and My Messages) to the right side of the page. a number of folks have been unhappy about this change, and i wanted to explain why we did it and what we're doing to address your concerns.WHY WE DID ITwhen we first designed DS, we didn't think much about advertising, as we were mostly focused on you -- our members. we stuck the ads in the bottom left hand side of the page, and "hired" Google to put whatever their computers thought was best in that space. to be clear, no human beings are involved - Google's computers look at the pages on DS and try to match them up with the most relevant of the millions of advertisers who pay Google. sometimes they guess well, and sometimes they don't. either way, those ads don't come close to paying the costs associated with running DS.we've ALWAYS taken a member-first approach to everything on DS, including advertising. our goal is to integrate relevant, helpful advertising across the site in a way that our members might actually even appreciate. as we started talking to advertisers, we found out that very few of them actually created ads for that small space on the left side of the site, and that if we wanted to accept mainstream advertisements from large companies, we needed to create a slightly wider area. so we decided to "try out" putting some ads on the right side, and until we sold them, we let Google figure out what to put there. as many of you have noticed, Google's doing a pretty poor job of figuring out what advertisements should appear in which communities, and in many cases, inappropriate ads are showing up. we are NOT picking those advertisers or those advertisements, and we are just as upset as you are to see inappropriate ads running.WHAT WE'RE DOING 1. tomorrow morning (monday), we are talking to Google to ask them how they can severly restrict the kinds of graphical ads that appear in our communities. this will be a challenging project, as there are thousands of advertisers, but i'll know more shortly and will report back.2. as soon as possible, we will begin to replace Google advertising with advertising from much bigger, more legitimate companies, such as WalMart and others. you should begin to see this happen this week. 3. we are currently working on a layout and feature upgrade to all of our discussion boards which will improve the layout and readability of those pages.4. if the problem is not dramatically improved within the next week or two, we will take further action. ultimately, if Google can't provide appropriate ads, we will simply turn their graphical ads off and look for another solution. i apologize for any ads which have offended or troubled anyone in our communities, and i want you to know that we read all of your messages and comments and take it seriously. all i ask of you is some patience while we come up with an appropriate solution. our relationship with our members is always the first priority. please understand that we run advertising because maintaining and growing DailyStrength is an expensive undertaking. we don't think it's fair to push that expense onto our members in the form of subscription or other fees, and so a tasteful, appropriate integration of clearly-labelled advertising is our best option for continuing to provide DS to all of you.  i'll post an update later this week. thanks for your time and patience. doug