Inara and advertisements
24 Jun 2020Artie
Greetings commanders!As you may have seen in the recent announcement, Inara is going to have some third-party advertisements displayed on the site. I am fully aware it may be an unpopular step. Before you will sharpen your pitchforks and find some unused torches, please allow me to put here a few words of explanation.
Inara was running without any ads for several years. During that time, the whole site grew with functionalities, more commanders with different needs came in, more game features were introduced to players that subsequently needed to be supported on Inara, the server was exchanged for more powerful (and expensive), and so on and so on. All of that made as a free service, made in my spare time, supported only by generous commanders who didn't hesitate to drop some donation (thank you very much, guys!). This is not something I want to change. I like working on Inara, I like to provide support to your adventures in Elite. But the fact is that the backlog of things you requested for Inara and that I would also like to have there became simply... HUGE. For example, the recent update for fleet carriers was quite large, required quite a significant amount of work and I still have a lot of things that should be made written down. With the upcoming Odyssey expansion, the amount of work needed will be probably even higher.
All these facts led me to a simple conclusion - I will need to invest more time into Inara and it's something I will like to do, but such a step needs some extra resources (for obvious reasons). Thus the decision to add some advertisements to the site, to secure a little extra over donations of the supportive commanders. My plan is to place the advertisements here as unobtrusive as possible (you can already see blueish striped rectangles here and there, hinting the ads placement). It should be utilizing previously empty spaces, placed mostly in the sidebars, etc. as I certainly do not want to annoy you or myself while browsing the site. There will be also added some extra options to comply with GDPR (3rd party cookies opt-out) and the privacy policy extended.
Of course, I am not forgetting on all of you, Inara supporters. Your help is and still will be invaluable and everybody actively supporting Inara will have all the advertisements on the site disabled, depending on the donation amount (it will be roughly a few cents per day, you can see your benefits period on your Inara supporter badge tooltip). Also, to make it easier for you, all donations were re-set as if they were made today, so you will get the full benefits period, it doesn't matter when your donation was made.
If do you will want to become an Inara supporter (or simply will want to disable the ads), please head to the donation page where you can get the link to Inara Paypal and Patreon, whatever is more convenient for you.
I hope that you will all understand the rationale behind this change, as it will be made in the benefit of Inara. But if do you will have some objections, please give it a week or two to let things settle down a little bit first. If your objections will remain even after this period, don't hesitate to drop me a PM and I certainly will try to solve it, when possible.
Thank you for your attention and understanding.
Artie