Thanks, Max! If this is the "short" answer, you may want to find a publishing house for the long one (actually, that's not a bad idea. The story of how Mudcat came about is an interesting one, and I'm sure the insights of running a site like this amounts to a lot of interesting and sometimes techie stories).

I can see that this ad stuff is a work in progress, and you can pull them as you want, or write code so it doesn't all appear, or so it only appears once, whatever. The browsers available today are each different enough, and when you compound those differences with an underlayment of various operating systems, it is possible that we're all seeing different things. I use Win7 Ultimate and find it a much more responsive OS than several of the previous ones. It does let a lot of this stuff through - I wish there wasn't such a Big Brother component - everything wants to report back to the mothership these days.

I visit Amazon's Alexa site to see what is going on with some sites, to see how new they are, what their background is, etc. (I don't make purchases from sites so new they don't have a track record, for example.) Right now Mudcat's total traffic rank is 84,231 in the world, 36,380 in the US (out of millions and millions of web sites worldwide) and there are 783 sites linking in to Mudcat. Alexa breaks down the demographics of users, how often people land here because of a browser search (lots!) and more. There is terrific potential here for you to tap into, and I don't begrudge that. I hope you not only manage to pay for Mudcat but make a profit doing it - it is entirely appropriate, you've invested in this. I am not surprised the grousing about ads was expected, or that it helps test what we'll tolerate.

Thanks, Max, for all you do here!

Maggie (Stilly River Sage)