Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

I wonder what sort of people visit Mozillazine. Firefox users in the main and maybe more advanced users. So I wonder how many will ever see those due to adblock.

Just a thought.

Ah...whitelisting. If you have adblock plus just go into prefs then make sure site whitelisting is checked and add the filter:
@@mozillazine.org

maybe that can be included in the next version of adblock plus :) as a default
O yea and i added a v to the end of my name in the previous post just not to confuse anyone.

Asa, thanks for the support. We're continuing our effort to fund the site while keeping the disruptions to a minimum. The current placement and type of ads is just the first experimental shot at it, so I expect them to continue to change until we find something we like.

I think we provide a pretty good service to the community, so it's rather disheartening to hear people openly say they don't think enough of us to view the sponsorships that keep the site afloat. I guess that's par for the course.

Jason

Considering everything that MozillaZine does for end-users, testers and developers in general, would it be out of the question for MoFo to cover some of the costs of running it?

Whatever pays the bills is fine with me. :-)

Asa,

why don't you post to the mozillazine forums any more?

why don't you support mozillazine by letting it run google ads? they are the least intrusive ads ever ... would you rather see mozillazine close? would you rather pay a subscription? ... i feel sometimes people just dont get it ...

Thanks to your post, I now realize there are ads on MozZine. I'll now click on the ads that catch my eyes and with which I disagree with (say, Republican ads).

At least it's plaintext Google ads, yeah but the placements desperately needs work. I click on a couple of times accidently no wonder. :p

I don't block Google Ads with adblock. The only text ads I do block are those text ones that appear as random underlined links in stories. Text ads are fine. They don't make noise. They don't move. They don't distract you from a story with bright pictures. So, why block them?

John T. Haller: Well, they do take up space. :P

(NB: Even if I had Adblock installed at the moment [I've been having issues with it], I wouldn't block MozillaZine's Google ads unless they were placed very badly.)

Google ads aren't so bad. O'Reilly, I've noticed, now seem to be running those awful Intellitxt things. Ugh.

I don't think the people doing the Adblock Plus whitelists are stupid enough to start whitelisting "good adverts".

I don't mind MZ having ads for other people to look at and I hope it brings in some cash. I certainly don't feel one iota of guilt for blocking them though.

- Chris

Ads? I'd noticed that more than a few days ago this site was being run from static.flickr.com..... Do we have white- and blicklisting confused? To me *-ads*/ means its blacklisted in Adblock Plus.....Does @@ prefix mean its okay? If Yes i'm happy to add it, but till now without it, the ads were coming thru anyway on mozalline.org, which then poses the question....does mozilla know tricks to work around their own programming to stop adds?????.....I always go by the rule that if you show you can do it, someone else goes looking for the hole, or?

I think it's fine for MozillaZine to run ads. But it seems a little odd that the top ad on the homepage for me right now says:

Mozilla Firefox: Download the Firefox browser for free and other great downloads. www.discountedorfree.co.uk

Is that the sort of things that MozillaZine should be encouraging?

Lots of sites get bad AdWords. The MAME forums constantly get ones for pirates selling games DVDs, for instance.

- Chris

"so it's rather disheartening to hear people openly say they don't think enough of us to view the sponsorships that keep the site afloat. I guess that's par for the course.

Jason"

I don't think anyone said that at all, at least not when you posted they hadn't.

To Sekerob:
Read my first post. @@ whitelists the ads. Some of the older versions dont have preset filters.

like my ol television....black and white on on screen ;>)

Oh and by the way on the confusion....some wiz-kid that dreamed up the addons.mozilla.org......i've yet to convince my firewall that *add(ons)....is a save word to pass....

To Dave(v)....was is it pre-set of pre-fix?

So Google ads are perfectly fine on mozillaZine.org, but they weren't fine in Opera?! :)))))))

I dont know why, but I have never seen any ads on mozillazine....I guess I might have adblocked whatever service they are using on another web page?

@Heh heh: Last I looked, MozillaZine wasn't part of the browser UI.

"Heh heh" is just another frustrated Opera trøll... :o)

Seeing as Mozilla is for-profit and all now... Shouldn't they at least provide their customers and user with proper support features like ad-free forums for help and such?

I’ve recently spent a lot of time at the MozillaZine Forums (I needed something to do while SFx is down). I don’t know what the replacement would be for it, but users would have abandoned Fx (and others) if it were not for the Forums there. I myself have learned quite a bit there so the ads don’t bother me. And I will click on ads that interest me to support the site. We’ll see how wide spread this becomes.

Opera fanboys, please get a life. Do you really think you'll change any minds with such immature behavior?

I really don't see why people object to ads. As long as it's not on the browser, who cares? Is it b/c they're born of money so they don't understand that most people have to reach for it somehow?

So, again:

When Google ads were a part of the Opera UI, then that was the end of the world.

When they're part of the web pages, then that's cool because people have to reach for money somehow.

When Opera wasn't free, then that was also the end of the world because why should those bloody capitalist corporate bastards want any money, much less earn it?

When mozillaZine.org is backed by the Mo*Corp*, which obviously doesn't want to pay a tiny fraction of the money they earn to provide their users a completely free community site, then that's also cool, right?

You know what? I'm sick and tired of this hypocrisy and double standards. Contrary to what some of you presumed, I'm (still) a Firefox user. And I hate the Google ads being pushed at me right now on a site I dearly and often frequent (perhaps even more, because they could have easily been avoided), the same as I did when Opera had them in its UI. However, things are changed now - Opera doesn't have any ads anymore, its community site is completely free (and rather cool, from what I could see), and it makes me wonder what the hell is going on in our community. "Want help? Click on this ad right here!" - is this the future? Either we stop grinning at Opera and its former behavior because we accept the fact that money makes the world go round, or we find ways to follow Opera (urgh, that sounded rough) and make the community completely free.

Hear Hear (UK Parlement back bench murmer for seconding the motion)

"When mozillaZine.org is backed by the Mo*Corp*"

MozillaZine isn't backed by the Mozilla Corporation.

I thought it was...

Well, there's the fix right there - MoCorp should back MozillaZine and pay its hosting. Surely it's not a lot of money, and they'd go a long way by doing it.

If that's not going to happen (and I don't know why it shouldn't), OK, what else do we do then?

"MoCorp should back MozillaZine and pay its hosting."

Such ideas have been floated in the past but there are issues of editorial independence.

Right now, the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation points us (MozillaZine) towards stories they would like us to report on from time to time, as most organisations with a half-decent PR department do. Occasionally, they ask us to run articles with particular statements or emphasise certain aspects of recent stories in our reports. For example, with a couple of the recent security flaws, they have requested that we make information about the fixes prominent. Sometimes we agree, other times we decide that we're quite happy with our original reports.

If the Mozilla Corporation paid for our hosting, saying no could become a lot more difficult. (Arguably, of course, they could make things difficult for us now: they could simply stop talking to us or perhaps remove links from mozilla.org to MozillaZine.)

The first complaint?
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=329100
Someone needs to tell Kerz his ads are in the wrong place.

"http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=329100"

We're looking into it, thanks.