Need funds, adding innovative ads to websites planned

Posted on Thursday 1 April 2010, at 00:12 UTC

Dear hosted,

Last July, we were alerting you about the difficulties TuxFamily is facing: lack of volunteers, financial difficulties. In a one-year-gap, the global volume of data has doubled. We host new, very dynamic projects, like Vikidia, and olders still active, like XMoto. The traffic is also increasing exponentially.

Thus, the board of directors and administrators of TuxFamily.org have begun an introspection in order to guarantee the sustainability of the hosting platform. This introspection is made even more urgent it appears essential to buy web servers in the short run to replace those currently used, which reach today saturation point.

We have immediately rejected the idea of billing the service, so have we for large ad banners on our hosted sites. It seemed to us we needed to work to a fun and discrete solution, both enjoyable and profitable.

A proposal has emerged, that has been adopted unanimously. It consists into embracing progressively an "advertising cursor". Our hosted' visitors would then get, in place of the dull, old-school cursor, the picture of a funny, appealing cute kitten.

This initiative will be effective on every web site in about 15 days. It's already available on some volontary websites :

• http://www.tuxfamily.org (obviously)
• http://www.vhffs.org (likewise)
• http://www.qelectrotech.org (warm thanks to the author)
• http://www.poudreverte.org
• https://faq.tuxfamily.org
• https://forum.tuxfamily.org

Elaborated with a specialized partner in animal-food, it's a win-win : TuxFamily expects a wonderful financial ROI and we expect, for our hosted projects, an increase of long-depth visits, related to the tenderness and sweetness that will emerge from your web sites.

Technically, we will use a transparent-proxy that will modify HTML files on-the-fly in order to add the "ad cursor".

We invite our hosted projects that would like to enable it immediately to take benefit of this service and then avoid any compatibility problem to just send us a mail.

TuxFamily.org team

Edit: Of course it was our yearly April fool joke ;-)