Zack, thank you for your response. I believe you have appropriately address my concerns and the concerns of the community. Banners are necessary, but continuing the complaints about the sticky banners is not necessary.
Two formats beside persistent horizontal banners located at the top and bottom that might be nice are inline banners. By placing clearly marked banners in a gray space between sections should be tried and sidebar appeals should also be tested, an idea developed but never deployed.
Finally, empty space around the Vector interface (for example next to the article feedback area) would be a nice place for fundraising appeals.
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Zack Exley zexley@wikimedia.org wrote:
OK, so we're going to stop the banner sticking for now -- and to compensate we're going to show newcomers two banner impressions instead of one and that should be sufficient to close out the fundraiser. (Let me know if it's not clear what I mean by that.) If it looks like we're going to fall short, however, we might have to go back to sticking this year.
Next year, we'll discuss options and do some surveys of logged in and not-logged-in users and try to make a good decision about what the least painful way for all will be to raise the money.
I think that we're now in a position to raise the annual budget with very little user pain starting in 2013 -- perhaps the least pain is that everyone gets 5 banners per year that are very small and non-stick. Or maybe it's that everyone gets one slightly larger, sticky banner. It's subjective, and we need to listen to a real cross section of users about it.
I am grateful for all the good faith shown over the years to the fundraising team at WMF as we've experimented in different directions that have sometimes been painful to get to this point.
Zack
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
The upshot is, vocal Wikimedians on mailing lists hate banners, and are quite willing to sternly lecture about their dire consequences! It's left to the Foundation, then, to choose between large numbers of donations
from
happy donors and unamused mailing list participants. Tough call.
My own opinion closely mirrors that of Michael Snow, so I'll quote what
he
said:
"That's not to say that I necessarily agree with all of the decisions
that
went into the current banners as to aesthetics or content. But I also
don't
have the expertise or all of the data that's behind those decisions,
which
is why I tend to reach a similar conclusion as Ziko. I trust that the fundraising team will attempt to balance all of these considerations,
that
they do listen to the concerns people have, and that they will make the best choices they can in light of the information available. Keeping that in mind usually helps me as I reflect on whether my own concerns are
merely
matters of personal taste or something more important." _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
-- Zack Exley Chief Revenue Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415 506 9225 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l