I now have a spreadsheet which shows me all the votes ever on Sotonians - up- as well as downvotes.
This means that, should I wish, I can see which one of you bastards downvoted me - or anyone else for that matter.
We’d previously stated that we didn’t know who downvoted who, we said it was anonymous. This was the case and will continue to be the case for the wider membership*. However, now moderators can, if they so wish, see this information.
The spreadsheet won’t be used to look at individual votes. Instead, I will aggregate the data to look at the number of downvotes that an individual poster receives on a given thread.
*£50 via PayPal will get you a copy of this report.
TBH Google ads is money for nothing. I used to have it on my website and only viewable if you weren’t signed in, which is fair enough. Casual browsers see the ads, those who sign in and contribute to the site content don’t see the ads.
The foot-fall on my site was probably 100 visits a day but it still raked in around £60 a quarter which paid for the hosting and more. Nobody would criticise you if you had ads to pay for running costs.