Carterlake must be a politician! He never answered my question!
Clammer
Are you not capable of understanding what's being said here? Can you not understand the difference between WU and Findu even when it's succinctly spelled out for you? Or are you being intentionally obstinate?
Lets' try this again....
WU is a commercial enterprise with one main goal, making money. They make that money from ads and from membership fees from folks who don't want to look at the ads. Those ads get seen because you give them your information for free. As "payment" for your generosity you get free membership so you don't have to see them.
Findu is a hobby site. The intent of the ads at findu is to fund the hobby, ie pay for the cost of running the server(s) and the bandwidth. As mentioned to you before you can find more information about the purpose of the ads at the findu site:
http://www.findu.com/new.html . As "payment" for contributing your data, you get the satisfaction of knowing your data might be used in research, and an opt-in QA system that is a useful aid in monitoring the accuracy of your site.
Would it be possible to implement a "membership" system on the findu servers? Sure, but that would force Steve to invest even more time and money in findu. Would you be willing to do that because someone was whining about the ads? I doubt it.
So to answer your initial question "Are there other contributors to CWOP that are increasingly getting hostile when reading our stations data and finding more and more advertising on the site?", no, you are the only one.