I think that there was discussion about these in the Freebies forum. You may want to check in there but it was a while back, so maybe try a forum search if you haven't already.

FirstBastion said:

I took a few screen snaps of the ads on the gallery page,  interesting selection,  though because there are three of them, top, and bottom,  and right side ads  they feel the most jarring,  taking attention away from the artwork.  Not that anyone will ever click on them,  nor leave any kind of impression.   

People do click on ads, if they did not, every free site would have shut down long ago without a revenue stream. My company makes most of it revenue through advertising, though in our case the bulk of that is ads in mobile apps, rather than on our website. Ad revenue is measured in something called ecpm, normally the amount of revenue made for every 1000 times the ad is shown on someone's screen. The ecpm varies alot depending on the content, the country it is displayed in and many other factors. For a website a typical value is $1-5 of ecpm. I have no idea how many 1000s of hits the daz forums and gallery get each day, but I would guess it is a lot less than the store. That said DAZ is global company so would get a lot of hits. I would have thought this revenue was a lot less than what they make from the store sales, but we can only guess. However I would expect them to at least make enough to cover the costs of the forum and gallery.

I know a lot of people hate ads, and dislike it when sites stop you using ad blockers, but they have costs to cover and advertising is the best way to help cover them. A lot of news sites offer a subscription service to access their content, but generally very few do subscribe, and for the smaller sites in particular, subscription will not generate enough income. Advertising is the reason a lot of the content we enjoy sits on the web today, and if that is blocked, that content will quickly vanish.

Some of these are hitting my RAM hard and my bandwidth goes berzerk. My systems should not sound like it's starting to taxi down a runway while I'm visiting a forum page that's all text, yet here we are.

The add pop ups are now in the forum as well. 

Ma è solo a me, o il forum della DAZ sta iniziando a far vedere la pubblicità?

many thanks barbult.

Also that is a cool render, nice work.

off to have a look at your gallery

well i would if you could do a search for artests in the gallery

LeatherGryphon said:

"The No Ads In The Forum", Complaint Thread

 

... 

I haven't been on the forums in a few weeks, so this was an unpleasant surprise.  I get it, it's their company forum/gallery.  With the uptick in AI, I'm sure the 3D market might be taking a hit.

What I don't understand is why DAZ+ members are getting these ads?  There is a subforum specifically for DAZ+ members that you have to pay in order to get access to (albeit, I've never posted on there).  So why are people paying to get access to something, only to be bombarded with these annoying ads?  Tumblr, DeviantArt, Nexus Mods,etc do away with adverts when you subscribe to their service.

C'mon DAZ...

DustRider said:

Mr_Fluffkin said:

With the ads it all looks so super unprofessional and cheap, the whole “high-quality" flair is lost. Just for a few dollars...

Can someone recommend other galleries that revolve around Daz? Do Deviantart, Instagram and Co. have their own areas/communities/tags for Daz renderings? I just clicked through the 3D art section on deviantart, but somehow they are 90% AI images and not 3D renderings, but maybe I just can't see all filters without an account. Whats the best alternatives to see others Daz renders?

There are a few options. I currently use DA as my primary gallery, but there is a lot of AI stuff there now. If you want to see just DAZ renders at DA just type DAZ into search and you'll get rid of almost all the AI stuff. Changes to DA over the last few years have caused a lot of prominent artist to leave, but I'm still fairly happy with DA. The sad part was the changes really seemed to effect participation in different Group activities and contests, which has reduced some of the feeling of community there

Renderosity is another option, but the gallery there is not what it once was, and IMHO the general quality pales in comparison to the DAZ3D gallery. When they redesigned the gallery several years ago they lost many of the top artists. Then they tried making money off of Google adds and the response was similar to the response here. It encouraged a lot more of the top artists to either quit posting or completely close their gallery and go elsewhere. It literally hasn't been the same since then. The adds were so intrusive (similar to here, but in the market place as well) that I quit posting in the gallery for quite a while, even though they stopped the add "experiment" after IIRC about 30 days, it forever change my opinion of Renderosity (or it was the proverbial "straw that broke the camels back") and I seldom buy there anymore simply because the whole add thing made me view them as rather classless and not fully trustworthy. As far as I know, no one who closed their gallery there ever came back. Yes, my opinion of DAZ has been reduced due to these ridiculous adds as well. The forums and the gallery feel cheap/sleazy and not a place I want to be associated with.

Another option might be the gallery at Renderhub. I haven't participated at Renderhub (or purchased) because there is a large portion of their store where the products are "Editorial License" content from games. Something that gives me pause, and makes the place is a bit sketchy.

ArtStation is another option that you might find interesting. Like DA, you can search for DAZ and see a lot of great renders done with DS and DAZ products. ArtStation is geared more for professional artists, or those looking to be professionals. As a result, it's not as friendly to those just starting out, and I've heard it's a bit biased against DAZ based renders (that old idea that you didn't make all of it, so you aren't a real artist attitude). However, there is a lot more DAZ based work there now, so that attitude might be changing. I actually think I will open a gallery there now. If I only post my very best works I might not get too much grief for using DS. It might be able to take the place of the DAZ3D Gallery where I usually only posted what I thought was my best work. It would also be a good location to send people who want to see my work now. The adds here simply make the DAZ3D gallery feel kind of "eewww". Not something I want to be associated with (the same reason why I still don't post everything at Rendeosity now, I keep sort of active there simply because there are people there who don't go here or DA, and that's where I started).

I think some people also use Instagram, Facebook, Redit, and Pintrest. But since I don't participate in any of those, I can't really say anything about them. I'm sure there are probably other locations that I'm unaware of. Hopefully some others will chime in with some great options.

Thank you very much for your detailed answer. That's very helpful to find a suitable alternative without having to create an account everywhere. As the biggest player, I find Instagram very interesting, but the 3D community there is probably just too small. I'll definitely take a closer look at DA and ArtStation, thanks DustRider!

crosswind said:

To me, some properties on Mouth surface are just wrongly set ... The vendor set Translucency Weight on Mouth surface but did not (or forgot to...) set Transmitted Color as well as SSS Amount, and certainly they did not check it either by "opening figure's Mouth"...

Your surely can request refund,  or simply set proper SSS values on Mouth surface... as below.

Thanks for the screenshot.  I'd rather not have to refund any of the characters.  I might not have used most of them yet, but had ideas or plans for use with most of them eventually.  Whether I ever get around to that eventual point or not remains to be seen lol.  Since dialing down the translucency weight to 0 works to rid myself of the glow I'll just do that, but it's one more reminder that half of the characters I have were sold to me with glowing mouths and to be wary of purchasing more content moving forward.  Nobody new to Daz Studio and 3D applications is going to be able to figure that out on their own, and to be fair, I spent quite a lot of time Googling for an answer before coming to the forum.

FenixPhoenix said:

Have you tried un installing and reinstalling the Genesis 8 essentials? I can't imagine why the mouth is loading like that in so many characters for you. That would mean that something is amiss with you install. Perhaps sending a ticket in to Daz could help.

I recently had just done that several days ago.  I loaded an 8.1 dev character and Daz Studio complained the eyelashes were missing, so I reinstalled Genesis 8 Female Essentials and all was well.  At that point I checked for missing files in other packages and there were actually quite a few, but I know how that happened.  It occurred when I migrated my installed products from my C drive to a much larger D drive (before I knew anything about metadata).  So DIM was complaining about missing files, but the files weren't actually missing, DIM was just looking for them in the wrong place because that's where the manifest files installed them to, and said they were.  Daz Studio wasn't looking for them in the wrong place, and the products worked just fine which is why I never noticed the issue.  But, I still fixed it.  I just did a mass reinstall of all the products who's manifest's said they installed to C to clear that up.

I'm having a lot of other odd issues with Daz Studio though.  Like clothing items clipping, but they're only clipping in the render.  They don't clip in the viewport or the Iray preview mode.  It's quite maddening to have to spot render to adjust clipping issues.  The amount of clipping problems I've had has pretty much quadrupled too.  Whereas I used to have little to no clipping issues with clothing, now pretty much everything clips somewhere or another on almost all my characters.  Well, at least the ones I've tried anyway.

Just earlier yesterday I had another forum topic up about a bloodstain LIE changing the color of things its applied to.  The only thing on the LIE is red, and yet it was turning items a cloudy white.  I don't see why a LIE should be doing that.  But it was changing the gamma of items it's applied to.  I need to check some others now that I think about it...

Earlier today I had a geoshell repeatedly toggling it's visibility to "On" without any interaction, despite my toggling it off multiple times.  This one is a new one to me, as this issue only started today, and rather frustrating to have to untoggle like 20 or 30 different buttons so your character's skin goes back to looking normal.

So I really don't know what's up with Daz Studio but it's been grinding on me for weeks now, and I've been getting rather fed up with it.  Every couple of days I'm faced with troubleshooting or working around some new issue that crops up out of nowhere and wasn't present prior.

I've considered reinstalling Daz entirely, I just dread reinstalling the more than a thousand products.  I'm up to around 1500 products now (not including custom content), or somewhere in that range.  I did install Daz Studio Beta to see if that helped clear up any issues, and a few days ago even updated my nVidia Drivers hoping that might help (while keeping the old ones in case I need to rollback).  Beta gives me a whole different set of issues, although I just checked and there seems to be an update so maybe that will solve some of them... or if it at least solves the most frustrating one (has to do with Beta locking up when loading Smart Content sometimes), I'll go back to using that.

I just upgraded to latest GC driver and beta. Should be fun. Thanks Daz Forum. I wouldn't have bothered without you.

I resisted installing an adblocker, but even a few minutes perusing the forum during the day has been unpleasant. I noticed I've been avoiding the forum and the store somewhat for the last couple of days. Well, I just installed the adblocker and wow, what a difference. It's so nice.

In this forum I seek knowledge and insight,
But oh, these ads that plague my sight!
Unwanted, unwelcome, they intrude,
And my patience with them quickly concludes.

I came here to read and learn,
Not to see ads at every turn.
They distract me from the discussion at hand,
And make me want to leave this land.

I understand the need for revenue,
But can't we find a better avenue?
To keep this forum free and clear,
Of the ads that cause such fear.

Let's work together to find a way,
To make this forum a better place to stay.
Where knowledge and ideas can be shared,
Without the annoyance of ads everywhere.

Endlessdescent said:

Thank you both. It must be a driver issue with the hardware. I will continue to persue this issue with 3DConnexion.

Did you ever hear anything from 3DConnexion?  From what I've seen, they seem to think it is an issue with Studio; second post here:
https://forum.3dconnexion.com/viewtopic.php?t=33750
If you open up the Advanced Settings in 3D Connexion, you can turn down the speed for each axis individually, but some parameter is off somewhere; might be simply a math error in the programming of the driver or Studio...

McGyver said:

DustRider said:

The adds here simply make the DAZ3D gallery feel kind of "eewww". Not something I want to be associated with...

Yeah, nothing respectable or remotely trustworthy looking... everything is like those scammy garbage ads "Click here to find out how to get free government money...", "Click here to get free dental implants..." or "Hurry and click here for Limited Edition Simulated 3 Carrot Solid Gold Plated Reproduction Buffalo Eagle Coins..."

I'm literally staring at an ad for Erectile Dysfunction meds at the top and "Jesse Water's Wife Leaves Nothing To The Imagination- Proof In Pictures" at the bottom...  

This is literally how low an opinion DAZ of its forum and gallery members.

Please send us images and links so that we can get these blocked.

When I open multiple gallery images at once, I get an empty space where an ad would be (hello ad blocker) every other image. It's annoying as it obstructs what I came to see (and when it comes to an image, there's no "scroll down to keep reading": you want to see it in full).

I really don't get it. From my perspective, Gallery and Forum are two places where people end up making purchasing decisions (I can't count how many times a galerry image or a forum post made me add stuff to my wishlist). So what's the reasoning behind providing (as dubious as they are) options for the user to click away from Daz? I could understand if Daz implemented "you have to link at least one of our products" rule in the gallery. Sure, it might be annoying, but at least it would make sense. But random unpersonalized ads? Who on Earth is going to click on those? Web-crawling bots?

Three ads...one on top and two at the bottom, one above the DAZ links and one absolute bottom.

This is a forum where DAZ products and 3D in general are discussed.  (Except for this thread and perhaps a few others)  Why would they intentionally whisk us away to some other site, for things we really don't even want, mostly?  And maybe spend the money we would have spent on DAZ products somewhere else instead!  Seems like a poor business decision.

"The No Ads In The Forum", Complaint Thread

DustRider said:

The adds here simply make the DAZ3D gallery feel kind of "eewww". Not something I want to be associated with...

Yeah, nothing respectable or remotely trustworthy looking... everything is like those scammy garbage ads "Click here to find out how to get free government money...", "Click here to get free dental implants..." or "Hurry and click here for Limited Edition Simulated 3 Carrot Solid Gold Plated Reproduction Buffalo Eagle Coins..."

I'm literally staring at an ad for Erectile Dysfunction meds at the top and "Jesse Water's Wife Leaves Nothing To The Imagination- Proof In Pictures" at the bottom...  

This is literally how low an opinion DAZ of its forum and gallery members.