[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[phoebe ayers]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 5:15 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
>  White Cat wrote:
>
>  > >  I whole heartedly hate the idea of advertisements on
>  > >  wikipedia but if we are going to have ads they should not be
>  > >  inline ones.
>
>
> Andrew Whitworth wrote:
>
>  > I dont think i necessarily agree with this. Some inline ads
>  > would not be entirely unacceptable. All ads should be text-based
>  > (not blinking animated gifs, not flash, nothing with audio,
>  > etc). Ads should be relegated to a very specific section of the
>  > page where there will not
>
>
>  Some community members who oppose ads might be tempted to say
>  "yeah, whatever, let's accept ads so we can finally get rid of
>  this discussion topic".  The two pieces above, however, indicate
>  that the discussion of *whether* to have ads is the shorter one.
>
>  A much longer discussion about *how* the advertizing should be
>  done would ensue, should a decision be taken to have ads.
>  Avoiding that discussion is already a strong argument against ads.

Ha! I wholeheartedly agree. We have better things as a community to
focus energy on. I'd personally rather spend the time to solicit
donations from all my friends and neighbors, than spend the same
amount of time to read through 5 gazillion+ messages about whether
blinking is worse than popping up. The happy thing is, I'd almost
certainly raise more money by actively doing the former than passively
doing the latter.

Anyway, I am a little confused about what prompted this latest round
of ad-discussions, since I thought it was a pretty settled question
many years ago. I feel like this conversation comes back every so
often, perhaps like [[El Nino]]: it blows through, causes a few
hurricanes, involves new people (but some of the same communities)
every time, and then quietly goes away again, leaving weather
forecasters to hope there will be a longer break in between cycles
next time. Someone with some time should do a meta-analysis of
perennial proposals on the mailing lists and the village pump -- is
there any periodicity to when, say, the question of advertisements
recurs? If so, this would be very useful to chart, so the rest of us
can go on vacation and stop reading email 'til it blows over.

-- phoebe