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Thanks, Kev. You have been doing this job for 18 years now and continue to surprise with innovations. Your endurance is impressive. Even very impressive.

Two old problems are resurfacing: doppelgangers and unbidden guests (bots or spammers or webcrawlers).

Oops, I forgot to include a screenshot, taken today.

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I made a couple of minor changes to how session information is handled. Hopefully, this should reduce the number of times you get logged out when you click on a link from another website back to PackardInfo.

Kev, thank you very much. I'll let you know if there's anything significant to report on this matter.

Is it on purpose that the site is showing Temu ads at the bottom or has it been hacked?

Incidentally, the new photo picker says it will accept png but they get rejected with a message that only jpeg is accepted.

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Yes, the single Google AdSense at the very bottom of the page is intentional. It helps offset the ever growing hosting costs.

Is there some donation tier we can hit to not have ads?

I'm sure that like 98% of the traffic does not donate.

The "burn rate" on the website is currently about $125 per month or around $1500 annually.

That includes things like the base VPS fees, extra processor, extra memory, 150gb storage, and various monthly software license fees. The biggest change over the last couple of years are the software license fees. Everything is now monthly, vs a pay one and own it model. But that comes with updates, etc. So that's Plesk, virus/malware/spam protection, down monitor, backup, and various other management pieces. Also, the storage the website consume grows all the time, between the PDFs in the archive and photos on the forums.

That single Google AdSense advert at the bottom of the page generates about $2 per day in impression fees based on current website traffic. I tried to make as unintusive as possible, as opposed to the websites that show adverts between every post and look like billboards driving into Vegas.

Luckily my labor is free!

Yes, we are certainly thankful for that!

What I mean is if someone signs up for a recurring donation, say $3 a month to remove ads (or whatever makes sense), then you would lose maybe 25 cents in ad traffic but gain $3. You have probably heard of Patreon which makes this type of thing pretty easy.

Yes thankfully the ads are unintrusive but considering that I donate here anyway it would be nice to not have them. For the raft of "Anonymous users" on the sidebar.... that's obviously a different story.