David Gerard wrote:
Didn't we have the lightbox argument last year?
Probably. Or the year before. Or the year before that. I did say "(again)" in the subject line. ;-)
There are various discussions popping up across Wikimedia about these banners. It didn't help that a bug earlier this week caused logged-in users to be hit with them as well. Talk about eating your own dog food.
The French Wikipedia held what appears to be a straw poll with overwhelming denouncement of the banner. It's also been repeatedly described as a phishing attempt. Complaints and confusion aren't uncommon during any annual fundraiser, but I think we can and should hold ourselves to a higher standard when begging people for money.
As pointed out on Meta-Wiki's "Wikimedia Forum" by Jules78120, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Usage_guidelines is pretty clear that the (primary) goal is that banners "be as unobtrusive as possible." I wrote this in May 2011, I believe deliberately outside of the annual fundraising that takes place in December so that we could have a calm and reasonable discussion about appropriate CentralNotice usage. Sigh.
MZMcBride