We have been showing ads on this site for quite a while. The issue with moving them around is two fold. Ad blockers are becoming more prevalent making it harder to provide a service for free. Advertisers have switched to paying less for ads that are not viewable (I don't blame them). So we had at the way bottom in the footer but no one really saw it. So we moved the it from the way bottom into the sticky footer.
All it takes is one click on your visit to click the x on the right side of the footer ad and it will go away for 24 hours (for members). So if you read hundreds of pages it won't come back until the next day when one click will once again turn it off.
In the future we have plans to bring back donations if you want to remove all the ads and get some other perks. I don't have an ETA on that. Ideally we can give away upgraded accounts to members who make significant contributions to the site (ie. actively posting to discussions). I would like to find a way to take care of the members who make this place active and allow the members who lurk (or guests) cover the server and software costs.
As for RV LIFE, that's just the name we gave to our network of RV websites. We are going through a process of getting them all linked up (ie. RV LIFE ID) and then you can login to any of the sites. This might be more of a benefit for the bigger RV sites but we also run
Class B Forums and
Home so we have some van related and deep woods boondocking sister sites that have a lot of good data.