No need to argue about this guys. If a member has a complaint about anything on the site, we want to hear about it. We'd rather hear about any issues than have members stay quiet and have usability issues or just leave alotgether.
As for the justification of the pop-up, it does increase membership. We get a LOT of visitors who come once and then leave, and the pop-up helps recover some of them. We have been running one kind of pop-up or another for over a year on this site and have taken feedback into consideration when designing this one (which allows you to log in right on the pop-up).
The more members we attract, the more knowledge and experience the community will have, which I think is a good thing. When we had very, very few members back in 2010, we got complaints about there not being enough topics, not enough knowledge, etc. So we're doing things that are meant to attract more members.
Of course, the site experience is very important and since I visit the site daily, I am directly affected by any changes we make. Quite simply, you do not have to sign in to use the site. Of course, your experience will be more user friendly if you do, and you can save threads, reply, post, etc. But by no means is it required.
The pop-up is set to display once every 10 days if you are not logged in. I think that's reasonable. If it's showing more often than that, follow these instructions:
- Log out of the forum
- Clear all cookies from LawnMowerForum.com (you may have to delete all browser cookies if you don't know how to manually deleted individual site cookies)
- Close your browser
- Open your browser and visit the site again. At this point the pop-up should show once. If you don't want to see it again, do one of the following things:
1. Log in and check "remember me" (requires browser cookies to be enabled)
2. Click the "cancel and close" button on the pop-up. This will close the pop-up for 10 days.
Overall, we have very few ads on this site (currently just one banner for registered members, two for unregistered members) and do so because at the end of the day, we do need to pay for server costs, office overhead, staff, etc. We send out a monthly newsletter to members, and organize and moderate the forum. All of this adds up and for that reason, we do have to have a few ads on the site. Of course, LawnMowerForum.com is free to use for all members.