Gout Pal Interactive

It is certainly not the type of thing I endorse. My circumstances force me to accept advertising at the moment to keep the gout sites running. I'm hoping other projects will fund GoutPal, and allow me to stop, or severely restrict, advertising in future, but it is early days.

Unfortunately, without more details, it is very hard to stop this. I'll try to find out exactly what you are referring to, and remove it / ban it, and do whatever I can to prevent it from happening again.

More importantly, I beg all gout sufferers who are tempted to spend money on products to discuss them here first. We might not know everything (present company excepted ), but collectively we are pretty good at assessing what will help, and what will uselessly drain your pockets, or even worse.

I have been moving around to other websites lately and have come to the realisation that “advertisements” are a very important source of income for websites. Most of them think of all kinds of ways to attract membership. I suppose the more members they have, or if more people logged-in the more they will receive from the advertisements.

I am not sure how it works – especially here at GoutPal. I am not being nosey, but just to understand better and see if we could contribute as a member of GP.

I will understand if this is something that cannot be discussed openly.

metamorph said:

I have been moving around to other websites lately and have come to the realisation that “advertisements” are a very important source of income for websites. Most of them think of all kinds of ways to attract membership. I suppose the more members they have, or if more people logged-in the more they will receive from the advertisements.

I am not sure how it works – especially here at GoutPal. I am not being nosey, but just to understand better and see if we could contribute as a member of GP.

I will understand if this is something that cannot be discussed openly.

Sorry for the delay in replying – I'm getting a little swamped with the number of posts on this forum. A good thing, I hope, but it does concern me that I don't always get time to answer everything.

Membership and advertising are two very different things, though may be related. E.g. some sites advertize products to their members by email. On the other side of the coin, some sites charge for membership in order to avoid the need to generate income through advertising. I do neither of those, but I do include adverts. These mainly fall into categories of commission payments or pay-per-click.

I try to restrict advertising to products I have used or that have been recommended to me by someone I feel  I can trust. Hence, I recommend the UASure uric acid meter from Arctic Medical, and I hope I am clear about the commission I get when customers select GoutPal from the list of sources. This is, of course, optional, but you pay the same price whichever option you choose, so it might as well be me.

Many of the adverts are geographically targeted, so I cannot see all that is shown, though I am happy that the controls by the advertising service keeps them legal, even if they are disagreeable to some. Censorship is not something I feel comfortable with. However, I can block unsavory websites if I have the details.

If anyone spots an advert for something that is misleading or in some other way inappropriate, then please send me a message. I need the page that the advert goes to when you click on it.

Sorry metamorph.

I truly appreciate the kind thoughts behind your message, but I had to remove the last few words as it breaches the terms of one of the services I use.

If anyone is curious, I can only explain privately.

I'll also put more on this subject in the tech stuff forum soon.

Perhaps we'd better keep this thread for good and bad adverts that we see, as it is the gout cures forum.

World is full of scams and lies, it's sad that work ethic and morals don't exist in many people now (at least those that matter).

Glad we have a discussion on this topic, desperate times calls for desperate measures and these people prey on this.

I have bought into a couple of gout tricks myself when I first got my attacks.