Advertisement on discuss?

Benito

Flarum team, why don't you put a few ads in your forum from Google and share the pot? By simply having us coming here you would get paid. I am sure your traffic is now increasing a bit.
Well done for the release.

Wellwisher

Benito smf forum does the same

Naclu88

Benito Yes , No 1 in this forum minds putting some Ads in this discuss forum.

tankerkiller125

Benito The Flarum team, in general cares about privacy, it's the reason why when Google announced a new way of tracking users of Chrome across any website, we found the header to disable that tracking on Flarum and set that header.

In general Ads are not privacy friendly. I might also note that Ads in general don't bring in nearly as much revenue as some might think, especially on a more technical focused Forum/service like Flarum as users most likely have ad-block enabled.

BurnNoticeSpy

Benito tankerkiller125 I would also argue that Flarum's shining example of a forum with a focus on simplicity probably isn't compatible with advertisements filling up any and all screen real estate.

It would make the software be perceived as busy and more complicated to the end user than letting it breathe and focus on the core controls.

Benito

tankerkiller125 Well, this exact forum is using Google Analytics and Cloudflare. Both using their own tracking services. Even if you try to get them GDPR-compliant, you still send tracking data of the users to their servers, and they will filter it back to you with a compliant filtering rule. Not sure if the privacy in mind idea will work here to be honest:-)

CyberGene

I prefer paying directly to Flarum devs rather than being tracked by Google while Flarum is getting only a few cents.

Benito

BurnNoticeSpy Just an idea Have 3 little "sponsored by banners on the right side bottom of this forum", webhosting companies for example. So you know who is there.

Most of us(users) came here for a quick forum solution because wordpress forums are bad and Vanilla is pretty much dead. So really, ads or not, we would have still tried the solution.

I think there are times when people should get rewarded for their work and sacrifices have to be done to keep the beast moving. Especially right now, the cost of living is getting so high, but still, many are sweating to keep this script moving forward. I would not think twice about it. You could get super deals from big companies.
To give you an example, I am a professional coder(full stack) but with this massive increase, I just cannot spend anymore time working for free, so I feel for others who still do it and would just feel happy if they could earn side money for their good will.

CyberGene

Benito Cloudflare. Both using their own tracking services.

CloudFlare doesn’t sell your data, so it’s not the same tracking as Google at all. It’s used for technical reasons: to optimise their routing. Can you prove otherwise?

luceos

On another Foss project I've been involved with, we had ads. It never earned more than a dollar or two a month.

Benito

luceos I think what you need is not this, but partner with a hosting company, and ask them to create for you a "Flarum ready" hosting package for non-technical users(and propose this on your download page). It will increase their gains and yours too. Many of them would offer you a part of the hosting income for up to 12 months. Just an idea for you.

Benito

CyberGene Yes Cloudflare will aggregate your data to third parties the same way as Google does (without identifiable IDs so it stays GDPR compliant. But in general any services offering you something for free, use your data to power the research of third parties, so they can build more focused products. They will know the browser types, operating systems, how long people stay on site XXX and many more. The only things removed will be that the data cannot be pinpointed to a specific user(exactly like Google and its GDPR filter)
https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/

DATA AGGREGATION
Cloudflare may aggregate data we acquire about our Customers, Administrators, and End Users. For example, we may assemble data to determine how Web crawlers index the Internet and whether they are engaged in malicious activity or to compile web traffic reports and statistics. Non-personally identifiable, aggregated data may be shared with third parties.

Remember "CloudFlare is a Google Cloud Platform Technology Partner" :-) Whatever you try to hide, big companies will always host(partner) this kind of services and have access to gold mines.

luceos

Benito but partner with a hosting company

That's a great idea. I'll ask Blomstra, they seem to have specialised on providing flarum hosting ☺️

CyberGene

Benito this isn’t tracking and is not personal data that is sold. Google legally sell your personal data. CF most probably just sell cumulated stats such as e.g.: 50% of the German web-traffic is purchasing footwear online. That’s very different than Google which will personally identify you and sell that to third parties.

Benito

CyberGene Cloudflare does not only give a DNS services. From behind the scenes, Cloudflare has a lot of deals with third party APIs(https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/category/all). When these APIs are connected to your cloudflare account, they then have access to a lot of data, but you allow this yourself (hence why it is not worded as "selling"). Every time a website owner uses one of these add-on, they successfully start sharing a lot of things with the Cloudflare's partners, who in turn receive money for the deals. All these companies have to survive, they have to find tricks to make you share what you try to keep for yourself. I used to use a lot of these add-ons when I had Cloudflare on my VPS's.

Benito

luceos You are welcome, I would love to see you making money guys, with all this hard work, time for being rewarded :-)
And with this solution, you bother no one with ads on the download page.
I could see this working well to be honest because a lot of people struggle with SSH, FTP, they just want to be up and running quickly by the click of a button.
You could you try to speak to a company like Scalahosting (which I use myself as I have multiple VPS with them), they are building a new panel called "Spanel" and are always looking for new ideas. I think that something like this could benefit both of you greatly, as they are growing really fast right now. People would then find Flarum from within their Spanel(example), could be cool if they accepted. Another idea too, the power of affiliates, you try to get a 3 way affiliate system with your partner where you get paid when people uses a flarum hosting premade solution but others who forward traffic to flarum.com also get a small reward if the deal is closed(if a customer buys a hosting package). This way you get a massive push from Youtubers, Twitter and other social media influencers always on the lookout for money making affiliates(it could be phase 2)....Hope this helps :-) Enjoy your weekend!

CyberGene

Benito All these companies have to survive

But CF has pro features that are paid and targeted at enterprise customers since the free tier is enough only for a small website. Maybe other CDN-s are different but CF survives without having to sell private data.

Benito

CyberGene Cloudflare has very big debts and is not making enough earnings through the service you are referring to, Cloudflare after all these years is still not profitable, sad. Cloudflare will not sell your own profile data if it is what you are mentioning, but what they do is expect users to register on partner's websites to share the user information with them "legally". Your user's traffic data is for sure shared acrossed partners because for example if you install a comment plugin from Cloudflare, all the comments will now land on their partner's servers as well as all the registrations (your user's data), traffic. It is really difficult to make huge profits with free services without any possibility of user's data or traffic exchange. As soon as new rules kicked in years ago about the difficulty of sharing user's data, various companies used this method, through API registration and usage. It works the same and sounds a lot better to the users, but the end game is the same, as you are effectively passing your details from service 1 to service 2 through a secondary registration.

CyberGene

Benito in any case CF can be used and configured without any user tracking (like e.g. not integrating it with advertiser API-s). Before choosing CF for my small forum I specifically researched if it would be safe for my users’ privacy and I didn’t find anything suspicious or hidden that would violate that promise. Whether they do it illegally is a possibility but I doubt they would risk their business in such a way.

Benito

CyberGene Yes this is because you have a technical background, most of my customers just download the add-ons without thinking ;-)