Opting out of readthedocs advertisements

[Paul Ivanov]

Hello everyone,

I've been away for a while, but now that I'm back, I wanted to chime in that I was jolted by viewing our docs on a site that inserts advertisements, it cheapens the experience and somehow undermines their authority for me.

According to this blog entry, this started happening in March of this year:
https://blog.readthedocs.com/ads-on-read-the-docs/

There is an opting out policy listed on there, and I just wanted to bring this up as something we should do, and gauge how other people feel about it.

I'm not sure who's in charge of our readthedocs integration, but while we have some grant money, could we figure out how much a gold subscription would be?

best,

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Paul Ivanov
http://pirsquared.org | GPG/PGP key id: 0x0F3E28F7

[Matthias Bussonnier]

Thanks Paul for bringing this topic.

I believe the previous discussion was this one on GitHub:

- https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/issues/119

I think mostly the core contributors responded to this issue and gave
their thought. I'm happy to revisit this.
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[Carol Willing]

Hi Paul,

Thanks Matthias for linking the original discussion. Paul, while I agree with you that an ad-free experience has its merits, there is also value in supporting the sustainability of ReadTheDocs, one of the most used open source services. While we can certainly revisit the decision to have the small ad on the sidebar, the team, back in March, felt that the benefit of supporting the sustainability of RTD was important and outweighed the distraction of a small ad.

I've personally been a Gold contributor to ReadTheDocs for a long time since I believe their service makes documentation more accessible and helpful. There are some good Talk Python to Me podcasts that discuss the RTD and open source sustainability. I would be happy to chat more about sustainability when I see you next week.

I don't have strong objections about removing the ads as long as ReadTheDocs receives similar financial income from Jupyter to sustain the RTD project.

Here are some additional links re: sustainability and Jupyter popularity on RTD:

• https://readthedocs.org/sustainability/ A fundraising campaign and its results
• https://blog.readthedocs.com/read-the-docs-2015-stats/ Stats from 2015 usage of RTD
  
• https://www.seethestats.com/site/readthedocs.org Stats from the last 30 days on RTD usage. Interestingly, Jupyter documentation is among the most visited documentation.
  

Warmly,

Carol

Carol Willing

Research Software Engineer, Project Jupyter

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

Director, Python Software Foundation

Strengths: Empathy, Relator, Ideation, Strategic, Learner 

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[Thomas Kluyver]

So long as the adverts are not crass or misleading, I think it's an acceptable price for the value we get from RTD. They seem to be doing a fairly good job of making them unobtrusive.

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[MinRK]

I'm happy with supporting RTD via the the current ads, as we concluded before. If they get worse, we should definitely reconsider. I'd also be fine with direct funding via a gold membership, if that is preferable to people. As Paul pointed out, we are in a funded situation that makes this possible. I'm not quite sure how exactly that would work, since RTD doesn't seem to have org accounts.

Since we use a custom theme on the main jupyter.readthedocs.io at the moment, that site is not currently supporting RTD since ads are not shown.

-MinRK

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[Yuvi Panda]

Do we know anyone at RTD? We could ask them how much they expect to make out of ads for our projects, and see how that compares to gold. I would not be surprised if gold actually makes them more money than our projects. 

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For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

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Yuvi Panda T
http://yuvi.in/blog

[JamieW]

FWIW: It seems like we don't have ads on our main documentation at http://jupyter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

But do have ads on linked sections like: http://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

and also on community-built sites: http://jupyter-notebook-beginner-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

[Damián Avila]

>So long as the adverts are not crass or misleading, I think it's an acceptable price for the value we get from RTD. 

+1 to this... I am also OK with a gold membership.

> They seem to be doing a fairly good job of making them unobtrusive.

Yep, I agree with that... they are doing a good job trying to not be disruptive.

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Damián Avila