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I've Had Enough and Today Everyone Has the Phoronix Premium Experience (phoronix.com)
134 points by iberinger 3726 days ago
9 comments

Phoronix is great for quickly getting up to speed with what's happening in core / desktop linux development. I tried using it with an adblocker exception, but the pages loaded so slowly or not at all (because the adserver was overloaded or something). Adblocker went back on after that.

I really want to subscribe for a year, but the only option is a recurring subscription through paypal. Yes, yes, I know I can just go in to paypal and cancel the recurring subscription (once I figure out where it is). But I have this weird paranoia that canceling in paypal will also cancel my premium access.

Michael, if you're reading this, I have a few suggestions on how you might increase conversion rates to premium:

- Offer non-recurring annual subscription

- Make it easier to sign up for premium. Instead of having to create a forum account first, why not have it run the other way (or both ways)? Someone hits the premium button on the front page, enters their email, password and payment and that's it. Afterwards, they can optionally choose a forum nickname.

- Consider offering forms of payment other than paypal. I always feel a little dirty after using paypal, and avoid them if I can. Bitcoin would be nice (maybe through one of those intermediaries that shields you from BTC volatility risk).

Having someone close suffering from being burnt out: please be careful. It will hit you like a hammer from nowhere and can cause irreparable damage if you do not take it seriously.

Lets hope people donate a little today to relieve Phoronix of some of the preassure.

Did not realize Michael works on that 100+ hours a week. Totally insane. Thanks for all the benchmarks and Linux info -- $35/year for you :)
I work in ad tech, and indeed some areas and experiences are less-than-optimal, especially in RTB.

Unless the site owner is selling highly-custom take-overs, skins or other non-standard formats, ad interference with site content and layout is almost entirely eliminated via the use of iframes.

Even better throw the sandbox[0] tag on it and then, allow scripts only if there is no other option.

[0]http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-if...

I consider iframes to be basically the most egregious ad insert.
You are being downvoted because you can make iframes seamless[0]. Unless you are looking at the source you won't even know it's an iframe.

https://jsfiddle.net/yms8ftyw/1/

seamless="seamless" doesn't do anything in any browser.
Thanks, I saw it in a Stackoverflow answer and while it did nothing in Chrome or Firefox I thought It might of been there for IE or something.
According to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4804604/html5-iframe-seam... the attribute is still in draft and isn't implemented in any browsers yet.
Why? It is safer, doesn't block loading of main page assets and causes way less breakage when things go wrong.
You're forcing me to make a request to the ad suppliers server. I understand this isn't unique to iframes but I'd much prefer that any ad content is proxied by the server I'm actually looking at. I go on a lot in comments about the invasion of privacy that ads represent and I think iframes go a long way to perpetuating that poor privacy 'deal' so reject them with aggression. I often find I'm forced to use the mouse to grant them any focus (which is frustrating for me because I don't like using mouse pointers but I imagine it causes all sorts of havoc with accessibility).
Unfortunately, the Premium Experience was an HTTP 504 in my case.
Yeah, but the site loaded very very fast, didn't it?
Is Phoronix Premium required to post in the forums?
Anyone know what ad network failed?
I've been surfing around on the (slow) site for about two minutes now, and I still can't tell exactly what "Phoronix" is. Having the short attention span typical of my folk, at three minutes I'll close the tab and move on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoronix

It's been around for a while, and is pretty well known articles related to Linux, hardware, and benchmarking. While I'm not especially interested in a lot of the topics they cover, I still think it's a valuable resource.

One of the biggest reasons I read it is that it's the best place I've found for news about Mesa, Wayland, and other Linux graphics support topics.
The guy scours a lot of mailing lists and posts about small releases and such. There isn't much content, but I've had phoronix in my rss reader for the titles alone; it's nice to be informed about that stuff.
This is extremely incorrect. He built a test suite PTS to uncover kernel regression and is credited for atleast one major power regression discovery. A lot of his articles are interpretive, but it's the best way to digest progress in the Linux world on everything ranging from kernel to hardware..which he often surfaces using git commits.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTUxMw

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA0MTM

PTS evolved into openbenchmarking.org which has had 17 MILLION downloads for people using it to benchmark and test their desktops and hardware. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=17-Milli...

On ~95% of his articles there is extremely little content. It's usually copypastes of release notes and emails.

Yes, I'm aware there's excellent articles on performance tests and such. They are rare.

I have a lot of respect for Phoronix for the sheer amount of time the guy invests in it, but it is pageview driven because of its ads. I sent in a tip on his paypal because of this as I'm hopeful this move will encourage less fluff and more high quality content.

Sometimes he does quite good in-depth articles (such as his Talos Workstation preliminary benchmarks[1]) but mostly it's a nice site to avoid having to scour mailing lists to hear about cool new stuff.

1. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos-wor...

Yeah, I've actually used it as my main source for keeping track of Mesa progress. It's really useful. It may sounds stupid, but I didn't know he had a "premium" version. I should send him some of the bitcoins I mined when you could still mine with CPUs...
Interesting.

You couldn't spend more than 3 minutes on the site, yet I'm sure you spent plenty of time coming up with your (in your mind) witty comment adding no substance whatsoever to the conversation.

I agree with your sentiment.
More of an indirect way of suggesting that basic presentation and marketing skills are more important than whoever runs the site evidently thinks.
Only if the site wants short-attention-span users. If they want such users to move on, their presentation is win-win!
Phoronix is my go to site for Linux-specific hardware, graphics, benchmarking site. Other sites have those as well but they are also Windows / Mac focused, which I am not as interested in.
If only you'd kept reading the linked article:

this site that publishes thousands of original articles per year and is the only place to find extensive Linux benchmarks, graphics driver news, and more