Advertisements

From Telepedia Meta Wiki, Telepedia's central hub

Telepedia relies on advertisements for revenue to support the hosting of our severs. Nonetheless, we want users to see good quality advertisements that make the experience as smooth as possible when viewing our Platform. Unfortunately, the advertisements we show are not chosen by us, but are chosen by our ad partners based on the higest bidder for that space at any particular time. As a result, some ads may slip through the cracks that reduce the experience our editors and viewers are receiving. These ads may include, but are not limited to:

  • Ads that take up a large portion of the screen and make interacting with the platform difficult;
  • Ads that are offensive;
  • Broken ads – for example, ads that are sized incorrectly and/or overlapping content making it difficult to read content or edit;
  • Malware ads that entice false-clicks or advertise malware.

Users can report ads directly to us and we will review them and take appropriate action to remove these ads if they are ruining the experience on our Platform. Please note that reporting an advertisement does not necessarily mean that it will be removed. Registered and logged-in users should not see all of the advertisements on the platform. Telepedia reserves one ad space on the platform to host an ad for logged-in users; this is solely to meet increasing server costs as the platform expands.

In the circumstance that wikis wish to have their advertisements removed from their wikis indefinitely (for logged-out and logged-in users), they can speak to staff members and make a recurring donation which would account for the lost ad revenue. This is an experimental feature that we're offering, and it would be be through an agreement reached with wiki admins and staff members. To request this email us at community[at]telepedia[dot]net and we will begin discussions of this.

How can I report a bad advertisement?

To report ad advertisement, we need some information from you to narrow down exactly which ad is the issue. We will then investigate the ad partner that is posting the advertisement and block it if necessary. The most important information that we need is the ad code associated with the advertisement (more on how to find that below). We also need to know which page on which wiki the advertisement was showing on, and where abouts it was showing. Please also take a screenshot of the advertisement and add that when you report the ad.

The ticket should look something like this.

Reporting must be done through Phabricator, which can be accessed by logging into the system with your Telepedia login. When you get to the login, please create a new task with the information above, and tag the ticket with #advertisements. Also, please set the viewability of the ticket to "administrators" to ensure that it is not publicly viewable. If it is an offensive ad, we want to keep this from being seen by other users, including on Phabricator. Please provide the information in the ticket, you do not need to assign the ticket to anyone. Please check the image to the right for how the ticket should look before posting. Below is the content of the ticket, please copy this to the ticket and fill it in:

  • Wiki where the ad appeared:
  • Page where the ad appeared:
  • Why is this a bad ad:
  • Ad Code:

Alternatively, some of our advertisements that are delivered by our ad partners will have a link underneath them titled "report this ad". This gives you the option to report the advertisement directly to our ad partners, for a variety of reasons. Clicking the advertisement will generate a pop-up modal with different options that allows users to chose the reason for reporting the advertisement and a short summary of why they're reporting it. Note that although this is effective, we do not see reports via this method and cannot action them ourselves — reports generated through this interface are at the sole discretion of our ad partners.

Telepedia believes in giving back to communities, and as a result, you may sometimes see charitable ads on our Platform. In the event that an advertisement does not sell and the space is unoccupied, it will be filled with an advertisement from a charity instead of collapsing the placeholder. Whilst this doesn't reduce the amount of advertisements on the site, it raises visibility for charities free of charge and allows us to give back. Telepedia does not make any profit or revenue from charitable ads filling these spaces.

Finding the advertisement code

To find the advertisement code, you will need to use the inspect element function on oour browser. The most important piece of code you need to relay to us is the comment above that ad unit. It should look something like this: <!-- [Desktop/Tablet]leaderboard_btf -->.

Ads we serve

For clarity, and to ensure that communities are only seeing ads that they should be, we have detailed the ads below and their placement. For logged-in users, the only ads that you should see is one in the sidebar on the Vector and Telepedia skin. This should not be in the content area, and if it is overlapping, please let us know.

For logged-out users, we are a bit more aggresive. There will be an advertisement fixed to the bottom of the window, one at the top of the content, and one to the right of the content in the Vector skin—which will split in two using a grid.

In some instances, our ad partner will show video ads. Controlling if and when a video ad appears is in the hands of our publisher. Some may see video ads, some may not. Furthermore, there may on occassion be an ad that appears at the top of the screen and scrolls as you scroll.

Please forward feedback as you see fit; we are trying different publishers to see which works best and balances UX and revenue.