Advertising

Since it takes time and money to maintain a quality website, this site generates some income through advertising. This site is an affiliate of Amazon, eBay, and Google Adsense. The focus of this site remains on its content, and much of our advertising will enhance the content by pointing you to products related to Chess or Chess variants.

If you are blocking ads, please consider the following reasons for unblocking them for this site:

• Some of the advertising is embedded within content, providing links to buy merchandise related to a game or product described on that page.
• Ads never cover or obscure any content. They will either surround it or be embedded within it.
• The content is going to be the same width with or without ads, because having a narrower content width is a design choice.
• The sidebar ads do not show up on narrow displays.
• The surrounding ads are all hidden when you print a page.
• I keep ad volume below what I find too distracting.
• External ads are served only by reputable companies: Amazon, eBay, or Google.
• Animated Google ads are not allowed here.
• Google ads in various controversial categories are not allowed here.
• Although disreputable ads may show up through Google ads, I occassionally review these and individually block disreputable ones.
• When following Google ads, I generally recommend using a tool like Web of Trust, which will tell you whether the website can be trusted.

Amazon Affiliate

Since this site is an Amazon affiliate, the following statement is obligatory:

The Chess Variant Pages is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

This site includes Amazon banner ads, search ads, and occassional links to items on Amazon. Following any of these ads will take you to Amazon, and any transactions you make will be with Amazon, not with this website.

The Amazon banner ads here are mostly hand-picked, and some are for products I would endorse, but an ad still does not constitute an endorsement of a product. An occasional recommendation ad may include items Amazon has judged may be of interest to you based on tracking you with cookies. If you wish, you may turn this off:

• Amazon Advertising Preferences

eBay

This site is an affiliate with eBay. You can help support this site by using one of the following affiliate links when you go shopping on ebay. It will not increase the cost of the product to you, but some of the proceeds from the sale will help fund this site. Depending upon your language settings, one of these ebay affiliate links will appear in the Shop submenu:

If one of the country-specific language codes listed above is included in your browser's language settings, the one with highest precedence will determine which ebay to give you affiliate links from. If none of these codes are in your language settings, it will check for country-specific language codes for some neighboring countries, specifically New Zealand (which will use the Australian ebay) and various European Union countries (which will use an ebay from a neighboring European Union country). If that doesn't work, it will check for general language codes for English (en), German (de), French (fr), or Spanish (es), and if one is found, it will use the main ebay market for the general language with the highest precedence. Finally, for any language settings without any of this, the United States ebay will be used. If you're not seeing the right ebay show up in the Shop submenu, you can fix that by changing your browser's language settings. Note that the language settings do not change as you move around, and they cannot be used to track you. They are mainly used in this context for accurately identifying the language and currency you prefer to shop with.

Various ebay search result ads will appear in the header and sidebars. The search term used by an ad is randomly selected from a set of search terms that have been tested with that particular ebay to return enough relevant results to fill an ad of that size. These include English search terms for every ebay site and terms in other languages for specific ebay sites. You can use the arrows on the ad to page through search results, but in some cases, the results will grow less relevant as you do that. To help you tell whether an ad is for an auction or a Buy-It-Now sale, these two types are separated into different ads and color-coded. Yellow arrows are used for auction ads, and green arrows are used for Buy-It-Now ads. For ads on the left side, you will also be told in the appropriate language whether the ads below are for auctions or for Buy-It-Now sales. In general, the ebay ads do not constitute endorsements of particular products, since their results will vary with the products actually being sold on ebay, and they will be featuring more products than I am personally aware of or familiar with. They are provided mainly to draw your attention to products that may interest you if you're interested in Chess or Chess variants.

Google Adsense

This site displays ads from Google Adsense. These ads may be tailored to your interests or location based on Google tracking you. The following types of Google ads have been blocked:

• Animated display ads
• Black Magic, Astrology & Esoteric
• Cosmetic Procedures & Body Modification
• Dating Sites
• Drugs & Supplements
• Gambling & Betting (18+)
• Get Rich Quick
• Politics
• References to Sex & Sexuality
• Religion
• Ringtones & Downloadables
• Sexual & Reproductive Health
• Social Casino Games

In addition to these categories, I have blocked several disreputable or untrustworthy sites. Relying on the Web of Trust and the Noscript Firefox extensions, I am able to check out advertisers and determine whether they are trustworthy. When I find a site is reported to spread adware or malware, I block it. If you come across any untrustworthy sites through Google ads here, please let me know. While I'm tempted to stop Google ads because of all the bad sites advertising through it, catching them here will also block them on my YouTube channels, which share the same adsense account.

The content of Google ads is selected by Google's algorithms, using information about your interests and location. Google ads are not selected by us, and they never constitute an endorsement of a particular product or service by anyone associated with this site. When you follow a Google ad, you will be taken to another site, and any transaction you take part in there will not be with this site.

• Google's Privacy Policy for Partner Sites

In-House Advertisements

Some advertisements are for other pages on this site.

Banner Ad Selection

The ads appearing at the top and sides of a page are randomly selected from sets of ads that are populated according to the page being visited and the language of the viewer. A visitor's language is found in HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE and is used as a rough indicator of the visitor's country, since the same language will often have multiple entries for different countries, such as en-us for United States English or en-ca for Canadian English. This value may be changed by changing your language in your browser. The set of ads selected from includes Amazon.com ads for visitors using U.S. English and Amazon.ca ads for visitors using Canadian English or French. For other languages, the representation of Google ads is increased.

Your Advertisements

In general, all advertising here is through affiliate programs, not through direct sales of ad space to private advertisers. If you do wish to advertise on the Chess Variant Pages, you should contact the webmaster and site owner, Fergus Duniho. Bear in mind that the types of ads blocked for Google Adsense will also be rejected for private advertisers. Ideally, your ad should be for Chess, Chess variants, games, or something else that might be of particular interest to visitors of this site. It would also be best if your ads appear as part of an affiliate program. If your ad is not in English, you will have to provide a Unicode transcription of your ad that can be run through an online translator.