As you all know, ATP is a completely free site and I plan for it to stay that way forever. I don't ever want to charge a subscription and I don't anticipate that we'll ever need to. The revenue we gain from the advertisements we place on the site more than offset our costs and even provide us with some income.
I do believe that some people who are "power users" of ATP would prefer to not see the ads, and that many of those people would never click on an ad anyway, so showing ads to them would be pointless. Therefore, this weekend I added code to allow those power members to disable ads for their account.
To disable the ads, go to your profile then click on your site preferences. In the list of preferences you will see "Disable ads on the site?" and you can choose yes and then save it. If the option does not appear on the site, then you're not eligible for the feature.
So who is eligible? Simply put, everybody who has contributed at least a hundred different things to the database. That includes images, comments, and databox proposals. If you've been active in the database then you probably have this feature enabled.
