Nelly's Left Foot said:
Yes there is. This forum costs more to run per month than the average household, and they help to cover those costs. You should look up how to make an exception in your Adblocking software.
Every time you load a page on Bluemoon, Ric has to pay for the bandwidth the server uses to transfer the data from our server to your computer. This is how web pages work, a server transfers the data to your web browser which uses code to display it to you in a nice way.
As I say, Ric literally has to pay for every one of these transfers, out of his own pocket which he does by working every day. This is an entirely independent site, nobody supports it financially apart from Ric.
As the forum grows, to try and keep Ric from been bankrupt because this is a busy hangout for people, non intrusive banner advertising was added to the top of page, which generates enough to keep the site going.
Advertisements are paid on per view and per click. If you cannot see the, the ad company doesn't pay Ric, but he still has to pay for the transfer. Hell, they aren't exactly the worst things in the world, and for all the work that a team of dedicated people put in, for free, to provide you with the pleasure of this community, I personally don't find it a big deal to ask you to unblock advertisements so we can keep the site running in the future.
I used to run a tech site that got pretty popular. I had to shut it down because I literally couldn't afford to run it any more because a large percentage of the user base started blocking advertisements, so I have a very strong opinion on this.