So one of the things I have noticed while making many of the changes to OSNN over the last few weeks if the quality of the adverts.

Giving the users the option to subscribe and hide all adverts is far too tempting to not include myself so I honestly won't see them all that often. However, as I have been working on the site I have not only had them enabled for my various test accounts but been fairly disgusted at how bad they are.

Every other advert seems to be about how some house wife has discovered the ultimate way to make her teeth whiter and while I briefly found this fairly interesting, my attention was not held.

Now that the various ad blocks have near enough been finalized I am going to try and work towards making cooler and more relevant adverts.

The current OSNN adverts:
...

So the longer term members will have noticed that over the last year or so and a gradual decline before that I hadn’t been playing a large part in the OSNN community and I just wanted to go over what I have been up to.

I guess part of it stemmed from the pressure to redesign the site which would have meant skinning and tweaking two separate systems. When I came home from work at night I really just wanted to chill out and enjoy myself. The Virtuanews system was an interest project, but hard work to skin with almost all page elements being spaced out in different yet similar templates. With the collapse of its own site and no real design community it got harder and harder to maintain it as vBulletin continued to change.

Regardless, I was looking for a new style but never really found anything. I met a girl and she became my everything, nothing else mattered. I wanted to be with her all the time and that was perhaps too much because a year and a half later...

I have just added a new addition to the OSNN forums and if you are reading this then you have found it!

Blogs have been enabled for the moderators, administrators, news posters, elite members and subscribers for the time being while I test and may well be expanded later depending on how things go.

Have fun!