JAGeX posted a message early this morning (about 1:30 AM Pacific Time) describing the purchase of buying Runescape Gold as supporting sweatshops, and encouraged their players to stay away from any websites that allow such advertisement to take place.

RSHumor.net is one of the first websites willing to comply with this requirement. If JAGeX’s belief that these sweatshops do in fact exist than it’s our responsibility to do what we can. Advertisements on our network of websites will soon be heavily scrutinized for these advertisements and we will take action to remove or prevent these (However it’s very early in the morning, and I’m writing this as I’m falling asleep on my desk on top of my ACT Prep Book, so it will have to wait until tomorrow morning).
We would like however for each of you to think about this. Most large websites cannot afford to have no advertising.

The advertising that JAGeX runs on their website you have to have millions of page views per month to get accepted into. Unfortunately smaller operations don’t have such luxury. You’ll note they also have problems with their advertisements, and such instances are actually in various screenshots on our main site (Selling of Viagra, etc). Any advertising system in which the person isn’t directly involved in will have flaws. JAGeX needs to work more closely with Google to see that this problem is ended from their end, not ours. JAGeX has far greater control over their trademarks and copyrights than we do as individuals, and in fact they already prevent people from using the word “Runescape” in ads, but that doesn’t stop them, so they need to look a little more closely at what they are doing.

Without any advertisements we could not afford to keep the site up and running, and I believe we share the sentiment with many other Runescape websites (large and small). We have exorbitant bandwidth and server costs on a monthly basis, and unlike JAGeX we don’t have a couple million dollars flowing into our bank accounts monthly to support our hobbies, joys, and the things we’ve spent many hundreds of hours working on (websites).

We hope to have a replacement in place within a couple of days so that RSHumor doesn’t cease to exist. We would never want any of our users to get banned because of a breach of game rules, so we’re doing what we can to protect you. If JAGeX feels like bankrolling the site I’m sure we can come to some sort of an arrangement in which we have no advertising, but as we see that is not likely to happen, we ask for your patience and cooperation over the coming hours and days so that we may mend any loose ends, and fix what needs to be fixed.

Much Respect && Much Love,
Travis && Linda