Just reposting Brian Goldfarb's post on a different thread. This gives you good insight into what is going on with the site, and the direction it's heading!

There are many great changes coming in the next few months! It's going to be exciting!

The original post is at: http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=796205


Repost:
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Thanks everyone for your feedback on ads. I wanted to provide an update on what is going on with the site and some changes that you should expect over the next few months. As always, our goal is to provide a high quality community site for users of ASP.NET.

In order to continue to develop and improve the quality of www.asp.net we have been forced to undergo several changes. First, Microsoft has hired Telligent Systems to begin managing and developing www.asp.net full-time. As the site has grown in popularity and traffic, it has become difficult for us to resource the ongoing development and maintenance of the site. This new relationship will enable us to keep the site fresh and begin to add new, high quality features to improve your overall experience. Changes in the pipeline include an overall site redesign, improved information architecture, updated forums software, improved control gallery, better Starter Kit support, integration with upcoming MSDN forums, and more.

In order to finance these sweeping changes and control our growing hosting and bandwidth costs we had to make the hard decision to begin serving ads. Ad revenue is being constantly re-invested into www.asp.net to improve the site and content quality and continue to provide the best possible user experience.

Over the next few weeks we will be working out the details of the ad system to ensure they are as non-intrusive as possible. Also, the ads in the system will only be related to Microsoft technology and will be supporting the many members of the Visual Studio and ASP.NET ecosystem. In short, the ads will certainly be relevant to the community at large.

You will also note that the ads are only appearing for a short part of the day. That is a temporary aberration as we begin to fill our ad pipeline. Over time, we will begin serving ads continuously, but until the pipeline is filled, once ads reach their per-day impression limit they will stop being displayed.

We appreciate your feedback and understanding as we continue to work hard to maintain, improve, and grow www.asp.net.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply here or contact me directly at bgold at microsoft.com.

Regards,
Brian



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Brian Goldfarb [MS]
Product Manager
Web Platform and Tools

I would just like to thank everyone part of the ASP.NET team. I think the community, and more specifically, this site, are fantastic. Keep up the good work!

I have no problem with the top banner, but I do find the banner on the right disturbing as it resizes the whole forum content.

And please put the banner system on a subdomain (like 'ads.asp.net') so I can block them in my hosts file :-) Thank you.

asdasdsadadasdasdsadasdsadsad

Hi Vanaja,

Is it a test msg :) .

Everything looks good guys.  Just two things I noticed. 

1. There is no code button above like there was in the beta forums
2. also transparent gif's aren't transparent anymore when they are uploaded.  Is there some kind of transformation taking place?

But all in all good job.
Nick

Thanks :)

1. This will be coming back. We actually did make a very nice code formatter, but it looks like it was cut before version 1.0 got out the door.

2. Yes, we programmatic transformations of the images and I think this precludes it from retaining the transparancey (we'll have to look into this).

Rob there is one more thing that I noticed.  You don't have

<link rel="alternate" href="http://forums.asp.net/rss.aspx?ForumID=187&Mode=0" title="ASP.NET - Announcements" type="application/rss+xml">

I notied that these links aren't added to the header which allows for easy access to the syndication content.  This allows browsers and applications that recognize RSS content on a page.  In FireFox it puts a little broadcast button in the bottom right hand corder that you can click and add the syndicated content to your bookmarks.  In the href you put the URL to the RSS and in the title you just put the title of the forum or whatever.  I put an example above for this forum.

Thanks,
Nick

Forum upgrade is nice. Thanks for the hard work.

Thank you for every one in this site team .
the Forum upgrade so nice .
thanks agian