Midnight commander home page shows ads

[woodengod]

At the end of the page there is a section that shows advertisements. This doesn't feel right. Could administration please find out if this is an accident and if not, explain why would a GNU project dedicated page need this?

[zaytsev]

Indeed, I have embedded AdSense code at the bottom of the homepage a couple of years ago. This brought us about ~$130 to date and these funds are used to pay for the domain name and SSL certificates.

In as far as GNU is concerned, we've just never bothered to sever our ties formally and they didn't bother to expel us. The last interaction was like a decade ago when they didn't like us using Transifex for translations...

I hope that clears this up.

[ossi]

how about a donate button and possibly a mention of it in the documentation instead? i have no idea how that would play out, but at least it would seem less weird (to the few percent in the target audience that don't run with an ad-blocker, anyway).

[zaytsev]

(to the few percent in the target audience that don't run with an ad-blocker, anyway)

This was the calculation actually:

Most won't even notice anything anyways, thanks to the adblockers and a few that don't have an adblocker wouldn't care. Meanwhile the few cents that would come in should be more than enough to pay for the domain name and certificates. Here apparently after 2 years we've got an outlier...

how about a donate button and possibly a mention of it in the documentation instead?

Right, that would be another way of doing it, but quite frankly since the misappropriation of funds drama I personally don't feel very comfortable / enthusiastic about setting up a donation thing again. At least no user money is directly being taken here :)