StackOverflow Free Advertising Designs (2020)

[david-allison]

StackExchange has a free vote-based advertising program for Open Source projects.

We used to be involved: https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/tree/master/docs/marketing/stackexchange-ads and we should get involved again: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/394409/open-source-advertising-1h-2020

Requirements

Ad Requirements

It must be an advertisement soliciting the participation and contribution of programmers writing actual source code. This is not intended as a general purpose ad for consumer products which just happen to be open source. It's for finding programmers who will help contribute code or other programmery things (documentation, code review, bug fixes, etc.).

Your ad should be an original creation which has not previously appeared on Stack Overflow. Please do not resubmit entries that have appeared as ads on Stack Overflow in previous periods.

In order to work, the answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules.

Image requirements

• The image that you create must be 300 pixels by 250 pixels, or twice that if high DPI.
• Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
• Must be GIF or PNG
• No animated GIFs
• Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
• Must have a 1px border if (part of) the background is white, 2px if the image is high DPI.

The output, which ultimately will be served in an ad slot on Stack Overflow, can be previewed by clicking through to this URL:

https://stackoverflow.com/ossads/300x250

I believe that we'll need to ask the authors to release the images under the GNU General Public License, so they can be distributed with the project.

It'd be useful to get a few prospect ads, one for this half of the year, and ideally a backlog so we can register as soon as the next one is out.

[david-allison]

Personal thoughts/brainstorming:

Definitely mention:

• Android/Java

We should mention some of:

• Other ways to help contribute: documentation, translations
  • Maybe UX design
• Why it's a good project:
  • Medical Education ("help teach the next generation of doctors")?
  • Education in general
• People will probably heard of Anki, even if they haven't heard of AnkiDroid
• Current stats: 6MM downloads, 1.6MM active users, 87 languages

We should decide what the "landing page" to link to should be, and make sure it's optimised for readability

[clouedoc]

First e

[nicolas-raoul]

Actually several other StackExchange sites have similar campaigns, so I am running many ads every year :-) https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/StackExchange-Community-Ads

@sheldoncoupeheure By "Androids" do you mean "Android devs"? :-) Also, I think "Flashcards you want to review" is a convincing message for users but maybe not optimal for developers?

@david-allison-1 Medical Education is indeed a great motivation, I felt really rewarded when someone told me they owed their doctor degree to the app. But to convince StackOverflow users, do we have some statistics (made-up example: 50% of med students use Anki) or short testimonial (maybe in the 5-star Play comments)? Please let us know when you post the ad so that we can upvote it (only people with some StackOverflow reputation can vote).

[clouedoc]

@nicolas-raoul You are right. I am referring to Android devs. Creating new ads every so often, I'll eventually make a good one 😁. Thanks for your review.

[david-allison]

@nicolas-raoul Lovely to hear from you! Didn't know about the other SE campaigns, just noticed the ads folder a week ago.

I don't think we have hard stats, Wikipedia has one about the Anki ecoystem:

A study in 2015 at Washington University School of Medicine found that 31% of students who responded to a medical education survey reported using Anki as a study resource.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40037-015-0220-x

---

We'll easily be able to get a testimonial from the Play Store reviews (not sure if we need permission for quotes). I plan to look into this tomorrow/Wednesday.

[david-allison]

Hello! As a resident doctor I can say it's a great app and recommend it to every learner in almost any field. But as I'm a beginner I'm facing a problem, the problem is with the my back template pictures on windows, when I copy a picture in the back/extra template in and it doesn't appear when I click on show answer button and it's the same with any note type whether it's clone/basic, it only appears when I copy the picture in the front template which I don't need. Can you please help me out?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki&hl=en&reviewId=gp%3AAOqpTOEboJPyqy4iqWy8kdxQi5GAqhjEOLBCo4f97S70eqE9ggwRprOqxPVp4_z_vHjXp6p92aPZipJrQ4TeWc8

I can't imagine my life without Anki. With its help I studied for medical license exam to work in another country, learned Hebrew, Italian, German, now I improve my English and started programming. The only minus I see is that there was no Anki when I studied at school and university :D

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki&hl=en&reviewId=gp%3AAOqpTOHDEJcOK8qYvlqg6EDo_FaXlHtvjCERs-LYwqUyHlNfXeQDc7VEj_8x0MAyFiy2N2OjlgfyJWXmn6SC23w

Best flashcards app Wish I had known about Anki when I first started medical school.

TODO

As a medical student, I find this app invaluable. I love having my cards synced and available to study on the go. The customization and ease of use are perfect, and I can even edit cards on this program. 5/5.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki&hl=en&reviewId=gp%3AAOqpTOHoX6eQMJ5bpAVimNetadjCfMH4KREX5_gNwOJkGQsrtlthhMAIU6cqTaR56pM9LwhfeI_cKONETkoJfvM

Perfect If I pass medical school, then it will be solely because of this app. It may be a bit difficult to make your own set of flash cards, but luckily I found a helpful set already made and loaded them up.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki&hl=en&reviewId=gp%3AAOqpTOHs8Y9DkSeDcpd2raGhm_gaqJyzl9kRJa4ZYylNkKf3sOJ1JV7ENdz4DIltm3o3WAPSWXPCft_tPMv0tMg

[krmanik]

This is just idea for AnkiDroid ads The stats may be changed.

The color at bottom follows AnkiDroid anwer button color. Added star & flag to show usage of AnkiDroid.

May be more improvements required?

Used following to make this https://www.flaticon.com/ https://material.io/design/color/the-color-system.htm https://www.gimp.org/

[nicolas-raoul]

@david-allison-1 I would vote for As a medical student, I find this app invaluable, short and to the point :-)

@infinyte7 I love your idea of using the review UI! Just a few things:

• I think the text is too small when viewed at half size? Maybe remove "Why Android is best?", replace "Used by ..." with ""As a medical student, I find this app invaluable"" in italics, replace "Powerful ... easier." with "Flashcards for Android", replace "Active users" with "Users", replace "Premade decks" with "Decks", remove the star and the flag.
• Replace the Languages icon's G with a A :-)
• Make the white parts of the 2 icons at the right into a different color so that the teal banner can be removed?
• "Must have a 1px border if (part of) the background is white, 2px if the image is high DPI."

Thanks a lot :-)

[krmanik]

Suggest any changes.

[mikehardy]

1.6m users :-), and 88 languages now! :-)

[nicolas-raoul]

@infinyte7 More nit-picking from me:

• Since you changed the background to grey, you don't need a border.
• Remove "Used by" and "Language learners", and put " quote around the quotation.
• Personally I would remove "Translator". StackOverflow is for developers mainly.
• I preferred the "AnkiDroid" banner of your first file, without hamburger/flag/star/3dots. I would replace "AnkiDroid" with "AnkiDroid Flashcards" though, to let people know what this app is.
• Remove one space between "app" and "invaluable".

I love your new "Users" icon with various skin colors and sides. Font sizes are good.

[krmanik]

[krmanik]

Join us on Discord or on reddit r/Anki

[nicolas-raoul]

My vote goes to the first one at https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/issues/6294#issuecomment-637306655 :-)

Since we have 1.6m users, saying that we had 6.6m downloads is kind of counter-productive. How about removing "6.6m downloads", moving all buttons left, and putting as the last spot (blue) "512 issues"? After all, developers want issues to work on. And 512 (the number of open issues currently) is a cool number haha.

Finally, I would write users/languages/decks/issues all lowercase.

I don't think we need to mention Discord/reddit.

Thanks a lot! :-)

[Arthur-Milchior]

Stating that a fourth of the download are transformed into regular users seems extremely cool. Personally, I don't use regularly a fourth of the app I downloaded, and would not be surprised at all that most free apps gets downloaded in order to be tried and stop being used soon after.

[krmanik]

[Arthur-Milchior]

Are there any tasks you know you want to give to new devs ? We can easily tell them to deals with the 22 opens "good first issue" ? Apart from that, I have no idea what you will tell them to do. Worse, you already dealt with most crashes, so we can't just tell them to deal with the crashes.

The reason I'm asking this is that there are still 50 open PR, and it seems that there is already a lot of PR coming every week. The bottle necks seems to me the time that can be spend to review PR and decide to merge them or not. I get that @mikehardy already spent a lot of personal time on ankidroid, but, unless he can spend more time or we can reduce the amount of work required from him personally, there is little way to integrate contributions faster. It's not like we can ask on stack overflow for people to merge PR, create alpha, and do all of the other tasks Mike has to do.

[nicolas-raoul]

The second image at https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/issues/6294#issuecomment-637351988 is almost perfect for me :-)

Maybe just fix the center alignment of "512" and its icon? And push the quote a bit more to the right?

The decks icon is great.

@Arthur-Milchior I totally agree, but when I mention these two numbers (about any of my apps) most people have too-high expectations (like 80% retention), even developers. And even if ours was 80%, better use the limited ad space to show an unrelated and equally relevant metric :-)

[Arthur-Milchior]

My intuition is that if I were to see this ad, I'd thing:

• I'm not really interested, it's something for medical student and I'm not one
• They are probably giving me the highest number they can, so actually the real number is probably far smaller.

The first point is only probably relevant for devs who prefer to work on app they use.

[krmanik]

Then may be better quote should be inserted so that, it cover more people of different sectors. (medical, technology, etc)

Numbers 512 issues, 6k decks, 88 languages are correct and can be verified.

[nicolas-raoul]

@Arthur-Milchior All PR reviewers started on the project by submitting PRs. New developers are very welcome as they may rise fast and become reviewers. Actually the arrival of new developers may allow existing developers to detach from day-to-day bugfixing and move to reviewing.

My personal opinion is that one quote is enough :-)

Of course everyone knows we are taking the most flattering numbers, but still that gives an idea about the size of the project. By the way biggest may not mean best: Some devs want to volunteer on Firefox-sized projects, others want to adopt abandoned projects.

[Arthur-Milchior]

Well, our biggest number would be the number of downloads.

We could even give tasks for people wanting to do abandoned project: there is ankidroid companion app for smartwatch; last time I checked there was no one updating it. But I guess that's going to be harder to say "We've got 1.6 million user but we also have abandoned project if you prefer" :p

[Arthur-Milchior]

allow existing developers to detach from day-to-day bugfixing and move to reviewing.

How does one become a reviewer ?

[krmanik]

[nicolas-raoul]

@Arthur-Milchior

How does one become a reviewer ?

Not sure about now, but when I was the maintainer I would just contact contributors that have been sending good quality PRs for a while, and propose them to join the core developers (GitHub role with merge permission), with a few rules such as "Do not accept your own PRs". Some really brilliant developers got there very quickly.

[Arthur-Milchior]

I fill like I have to ask this, the icon on top of "language" seems really similar to Google Translate icon ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Traduction ). I assume we have no authorization from Google here. I can't find any rule in stackoverflow stating that it is forbidden to use icon of an unrelated program, but that seems to me to be a potential risk later, a reason to be rejected. I honestly have no idea what are Google rules about reusing their logo in this kind of case.

[krmanik]

@nicolas-raoul Contribute on /github/ as UX Designer Developer

Contribute on /github/ as UX Designer Programmer

Which one?

@Arthur-Milchior What about it?

More at https://www.flaticon.com/search?word=translate

[nicolas-raoul]

Maybe "Developer"? :-)

Language: I prefer the first icon (because it is not a conversation) but I would use darker yellow shades.

[Arthur-Milchior]

Flaticon states the uses are "Free for personal and commercial purpose with attribution", I don't see how we make attributions in an ad. But honestly, I'm mostly surprised that it is legal at all for them to state "you can use google translate logo as long as you attribute it to us". Worse, their term and condition seems to indicate that any user can upload icons, and that they don't check for copyright unless someone notifies them there is a copyright infringement. Since they give license with no time limit, it seems to make very little sens to me. I should note that they are a spanish company, while google and stackoverflow are US company, so license law may simply be different. In particular, the user who did upload the google icon uploaded more than a million icons. There is no way they checked for all copyright problem. Clearly, I would not fill comfortable submitting an ad with icons they provide. But I'm probably far too risk averse, and I don't really expect anything bad to occurs if you use any of those icons.

[nicolas-raoul]

wow that's sad, good catch Arthur! Yes, we must use public domain or self-made icons.

[krmanik]

We can use the icons but on landing page we can give attribution. Or Simply remove the icon.

I will try to make some icons

[krmanik]

can we use this? https://icons8.com/icons/set/royalty-free-translate

https://material.io/resources/icons/

https://icons8.com/license

[Arthur-Milchior]

I would not trust icons8 either to be honest. I don't believe they can have legally obtained the right they claim on the google logo. On the other hand, material.io is owned by google, so it seems safer if we respect their conditions.

[krmanik]

Okay, I will make icons for those text.

[Arthur-Milchior]

Thank you very much. Let me tell you I am sincerely sorry for the extra work I'm giving you and appreciate that you take time to create the ad in the first place.

[krmanik]

I have made all icons in InkScape

[david-allison]

WOW! That looks fantastic.

A few ideas. I'm by no means a design expert, feel free to pick and choose the ones that work:

• Should we mention Java/Android on the development side?

• Move the text on the answer buttons roughly halfway between the border and the numeric text

• Use a capital M (or MM - my preference) for million

• Move both the quote and the "Contribute ... as" a little further away from the border

• Try rounded quotes instead of straight quotes

• Anki logo is a little too far away from the left border, move it closer/make it bigger

  • I might be tempted to consider moving "contribute as" to the title position, keep the Anki logo on the left underneath it, and using the rest of the space for the quote

• (unsure) could we try small caps/all caps for the text at the bottom of the answer buttons

[krmanik]

[david-allison]

Okay:

• I like the K and the M - much better 😁
• Android/Java is a great touch
• I like the quotes
• Spacing at the bottom is much better

I don't think the all-caps works, thanks for trying it!

If I were to give spacing another go:

• Move the red text right, so the "J" in Java is a few pixels right of the AnkiDroid star
• Move the red text down, to give it more spacing from the title (maybe halfway between the top of the Anki Logo and the top of the star

Do you have an SVG? Happy to do these myself if you'd like - I don't want to be talking without putting effort in (I have Inkscape).

[mikehardy]

Are there any tasks you know you want to give to new devs ? We can easily tell them to deals with the 22 opens "good first issue" ? Apart from that, I have no idea what you will tell them to do. Worse, you already dealt with most crashes, so we can't just tell them to deal with the crashes.

There are a number of issues tagged as "good first issue" and if anyone sees other issues that seem like good candidates and you don't have the ability to flag issues in the repo, please let me know with a comment on the issue, and we can flag it

The reason I'm asking this is that there are still 50 open PR, and it seems that there is already a lot of PR coming every week. The bottle necks seems to me the time that can be spend to review PR and decide to merge them or not. I get that @mikehardy already spent a lot of personal time on ankidroid, but, unless he can spend more time or we can reduce the amount of work required from him personally, there is little way to integrate contributions faster. It's not like we can ask on stack overflow for people to merge PR, create alpha, and do all of the other tasks Mike has to do.

This is quite true - I'm actively thinking about this problem - it's a common one in open source. We need more people with commit power in the repo and if we don't have that and I'm bottlenecking then that is on me. Your patience in particular is really appreciated @Arthur-Milchior. As our test harness grows it does make PRs easier to handle at least so there's general progress in velocity regardless.

That said, I'm happy to see what happens, if we get a deluge of contributors/contributions, I/we will handle it somehow I'm sure (a quick "welcome new contributor" guide in a wiki, a bit of extra effort for the first merges etc)

[mikehardy]

@Arthur-Milchior

How does one become a reviewer ?

Not sure about now, but when I was the maintainer I would just contact contributors that have been sending good quality PRs for a while, and propose them to join the core developers (GitHub role with merge permission), with a few rules such as "Do not accept your own PRs". Some really brilliant developers got there very quickly.

Yep - exactly this, as I am relatively new to the project I have not felt comfortable delegating permissions which are themselves new to me, so I have not done this actively - I did so just recently with @david-allison-1 because his contributions almost always come with built-in unit tests which is so rare as a quality indicator I figured "even if I'm new, this shouldn't hurt...". If you are interested @Arthur-Milchior let me know

[clouedoc]

@infinyte7 your ads are great !

[krmanik]

Next with more scaling/centered/re-positioned

[mikehardy]

Others may have opinions (nothing like graphics to bring out opinions haha) but I'm satisfied if anything like this goes out. I like it. The stats will change (they're already changing) but I don't think it's that important to have them up to date - they're certainly close enough right now. Cheers @infinyte7 !

[krmanik]

updated stats

[krmanik]

More tinkering

[nicolas-raoul]

@infinyte7 If you really want a border: a border on the white parts of the left and right sides is enough. I suggest making the border same color as the background of the "AnkiDroid Flashcards" banner so that it forms a coherent unit, in the same spirit as https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/StackExchange-Community-Ads/blob/master/cmissync-on-stackoverflow.png (red banner+red border). Thanks! :-)

[krmanik]

[krmanik]

When will it get posted on Stackoverflow?

[david-allison]

@nicolas-raoul, I think we could use your guidance on this matter. @infinyte7, also would like to hear your opinion, because it's your ad, it's awesome, and your preference holds a lot of weight.

In your experience, would it be best to wait for the 2H 2020 thread and get the most impact/longevity/upvotes from the ad, or to post immediately and hope it gets appropriate volunteer flow so we can use a second ad in a month or so?

---

I think it depends on how 'late' the 2020 2H thread is, if we could prod StackOverflow and get the next thread up in July, or even start voting now, it'd definitely be best to post there. If it's going to be 3 months late, it's best to post the ad now.

My main concern would be posting now and the thread wouldn't get the viewership to push it over the "ad can be seen" threshold.