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.

[nicolas-raoul]

1H started super late, 2H will probably be the same or it might even be cancelled as Stack is super-busy right now for internal reasons. So I would say post it now :-)

Posts almost never get upvoted by passerbys after the first few weeks, so we will have to find voters. If we don't reach the threshold we can use the same image next time.

Minimum StackOverflow reputation to post on meta is 5, minimum reputation to upvote is 15, so if anyone has between 5 and 14 points on StackOverflow, please let us know right now :-)

Let's post the code below right now, and then edit anytime (I have maximum privileges so I can edit any post), for instance if we find a better image/tooltip/landing page:

[![AnkiDroid Flashcards: Help all students learn more efficiently][1]][2]

  [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/gn8my.png
  [2]: https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/wiki/Development-Guide

[david-allison]

@nicolas-raoul Sounds good. I've got the rep (21). Want me to post, or would you like to do the honours?

[nicolas-raoul]

@david-allison-1 Please post so that you can edit it as you wish later :-) Then I guess we will have to beg for upvotes on the mailing list and elsewhere haha

[david-allison]

@nicolas-raoul @infinyte7 @mikehardy @Arthur-Milchior https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/398005/13121290

[david-allison]

That was fast!

[david-allison]

Hmm... something's wrong: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/ads/display/394409 - hasn't picked up the image. Might need some more time

[mikehardy]

Looks great to me. Another 5 votes and we're in 3rd place :-). I voted

[david-allison]

Any suggestions for changes to make, the ad's over the threshold, but rendering as empty?

[mikehardy]

It rendered for me. I saw the ad.

[david-allison]

@mikehardy here too? https://meta.stackoverflow.com/ads/display/394409

[mikehardy]

Something needs to change - I don't see it in that link. No alt text, link is wrong, no img source - I expanded the one that is next to us for comparison in firefox dev tools

[david-allison]

Tried removing spacing, adding a trailing line break and converting to LF line endings, let's see if that fixes things

[david-allison]

Tracked: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398031/one-of-the-open-source-community-promotion-ads-is-not-displaying-properly

[mikehardy]

Still not showing up :-( - so weird

[david-allison]

And no official response from StackOverflow yet, disappointing

[david-allison]

And it's live! Thanks @infinyte7.

[mikehardy]

Fantastic! Good looking ad, nice to see it out there. Thanks also for edits and gardening on the developer guide @david-allison-1 :-)

I think this is close-able?

[david-allison]

(Optional) We might want to continue the tradition of moving the images/source into the git repo.

I'd vote as a slight "no" as the history's searchable in the GitHub issues, we can't re-use the images and it's best not to clog up the repo with binary files/links if they're unnecessary.

EDIT: Will close tentatively