How bout we worry about ads on our forum software till after we have the damn thing running live on our servers?
Cause giving the devs some input for future ways of making their end users happy is never a bad thing?
Here's my suggestions for ads and banners:
1) I'd like to be able to control the location of my ads in my forum better. The way vB offers it now is okay, but perhaps could be ammended with additional frequently-seen locations. In other words, below the navbar, above the footer, under the first post in a thread, perhaps a standard ad-module in the sidebar.
2) I'd like to not have to choose between either/or graphics and text the way vB currently has it set up. For Google-Ads, I use text-only at the top and footer. I run a custom banner-add-on. It would be awesome if Xenforo would enable me to do both without requiring additional installations, but grouped together under advertising. I exclusively use animated GIFs, but can see other would have a use for Flash banners as well.
3) For banners, I would like to be able to configure an image location, a banner target (as in where to head to when the banner is clicked), dimension-fields, active/inactive checkbox, a counter to keep track how many times a banner has been clicked, and a date-field tat allows me to configure how long a banner will remain active for, with a cron-job deactivating banners once a day or so). Basically everything offered by the
VSA Flash Banner mod, but built-in, and with the addition of a date-field (or even better, two date fields to schedule ahead).
4) I would like the ability to be able to switch ads and/or banners off for specific usergroups, without template edits. In other words, it would be greatly appreciated if the default templates have soem default conditional statements built-in to do checks like that.
Lastly, I would love for the ad-model to be transparent. NOT the way IB currently has things going, but seeing I already paid for a forum software license, and seeing it's from then on MY efforts to pull in users that click on ads, the money generated that way ought to be mine. If that's how vB works, then fine, but I'd be much more happy if Xenforo just explicitly states this somewhere in black and white.
Just some thoughts. This list probably is not complete by any means, and I can live with Kier's suggestion of building the forum first, but I figured I'd list some thoughts anyway
Cheers,
Peter