The ads are brand new.
Keep in mind that this site is privately owned by an individual, who pays a lot of money each month for web hosting and software licensing and domain registration - all out of pocket. You get my priceless insights as well as all of the iffy stuff that everybody else posts here for 100% free on the back of that one guy who is footing the bill. After the website upgrade, that bill went up. The new ads almost certainly don't cover the bills, but it's something. The least you can do is allow a few ads to prevent the site from bankrupting our benefactor. Not only that, but it's not every page load - it serves you ads on something like the first five pages (I didn't count) and then it doesn't serve you any more ads for like an hour or something (I haven't timed it).
Personally, I would be in favor of having paid memberships (maybe a buck or two a month) that entitled members to a higher tier of access - something like ability to post in designated game threads, ability to go over N posts per month, something like that. Free to read, small fee to contribute in full just to keep the thing afloat. But that's not my decision to make, if such a thing is even within the capability of the software. So ads it is.