Guys, you may have noticed some significant changes to the existing Recommended Products system that had been operating for some years.
This was in place to help the site make a contribution to itself on running costs in combination with the donation system.
We of course really appreciate you clicking on these “ads” as they help contribute to the site when you make a purchase of any product on Amazon at no additional cost to you
Unfortunately, Amazon changed the Affiliate resources radically, so eventually we had to completely update the system. The old image based links were completely deprecated so we had to design our own.
This is long overdue as there were loads of dead images all over the site. Sorry about that. It took a while for it to get to the top of the priority list. As you know, earning a real living comes first 
The Good News 
- The products are now placed
automatically with the help of AI 
- The algorithm is designed to only place products that are truly relevant to the discussion.
- It is vastly easier to maintain them going forward.
- They no longer pollute the actual posts.
- The frequency of them is chosen so it’s not too intrusive whilst providing a reasonable opportunity for readers to support the site if they so wish.
The Not-so-good News 
- They might be a little repetitive. Some products (like books on migraine) are so generic that they get placed quite often. We are still refining the algorithm which has gone through a few iterations already including many bug fixes.
They slow the site access down a little. We are working on speeding things up as far as we can.This is resolved.There are still (at the time of writing) over 250 of the older ads to migrate and delete!These have all been removed (except for the recommended products page which has been hidden)
They are disabled for long topics so that the wait time isn’t too ridiculous and they are cached so that if someone has recently visited the same topic, the calculations are remembered so the delay is minimal. However if you go to an old topic that someone hasn’t visited for a while, there might be a slight increased delay in seeing it.
Let me know if you have any issues with the new system or even if you have some positive feedback. Let me know your thoughts.
NB Please DO NOT use voucher browser extensions like “Honey” as they’ve been known to change affiliate links to their own, effectively stealing the money.
