I have no issue in principle with ads. Recently we had ads on our wiki on openqa.org. The proceeds of this were divided between Patrick Lightbody, who runs OpenQA.org, and Contegix, which provides the hosting. For a while Charley was looking into hosting our wiki ourselves with the understanding that we would be able to use the ad revenue to help pay the hosting costs. That never happened, largely because it is a lot of work. As you all know, OpenQA can sometimes take a lot of time to run, as it has recently when Patrick has been updating to newer versions of Jira and Confluence and dealing with a fairly massive spam problem.
Recently, the ads on the Watir Wiki have been taken down. I don't know if this is a temporary situation caused by the upgrade to a new version of Confluence or not. I won't be surprised if Patrick puts them up again. Sometimes the vendorscript ads can be annoying, and seemly undermining our message. At the same time, I know that when I was doing WatirCraft LLC, we used adwords and had our ads (for watir training and consulting) showing up on the wiki. Going forward it would be great to provide an advertising forum for Watir-related products and services. To me it is really a matter of initiative. If some one wants to volunteer to set up hosting and ads for watir.com or the watir wiki then that would be great. So far, we've generally found it easier to take advantage of hosting arrangements that require less work on our part, but don't let us get ad revenue. This has been true with Rubyforge (which I think discourages ads, but am not sure), Wordpress (which does ban them) and OpenQA.org (which reserves the right to post ads and take the revenue). A final note. For a time we had a low-level dispute with OpenQA.org. The problem was that Patrick wanted us to host our home page at OpenQA, but we didn't want to because our home page looked like crap there, when we used the OpenQA templates, which was a requirement. I think the root of this requirement was that he wanted to pull ad revenue. In any case, we kept our home page on Rubyforge for several years, before recently migrating it to the new Watir.com site. The real issue for me was never the ads, but rather that I wanted our home page to look good. Bret On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 8:49 PM, Alister Scott <[email protected]>wrote: > I am personally against advertisements on watir.com, because I think it > defeats the whole purpose of creating a kick-ass open source tool, if your > main site for it has advertisements for commercial/proprietary automated > testing tools (wasn't watir created to avoid using vendorscripts?) > > Why is this thought even being raised? Are we short of money or something? > What are the big costs we need money for? The current web site is hosted (by > wordpress) for free... > > Even if we wanted to run ads on watir.com, we can't because we're using > wordpress.com. We would need to migrate the blog to our own host and then > pay hosting costs. It's a bit of a wasted effort in my honest opinion. > > I look forward to hearing others thoughts on this matter. > > Cheers, > > Alister > > Alister Scott > Brisbane, Australia > Watir Web Master: http://watir.com > Blog: http://watirmelon.com > Google: http://www.google.com/profiles/alister.scott > LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alisterscott > > _______________________________________________ > Wtr-development mailing list > [email protected] > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-development > -- Bret Pettichord Lead Developer, Watir, www.watir.com Blog, www.io.com/~wazmo/blog Twitter, www.twitter.com/bpettichord
_______________________________________________ Wtr-development mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-development
