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As it is December 2012, we are now going to reset our Community Promotion Ads for the new year.

What are Community Promotion Ads?

Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.

Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?

This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

  • the site's twitter account
  • useful tools or resources for the mathematically inclined
  • interesting articles or findings for the curious
  • cool events or conferences
  • anything else your community would genuinely be interested in

The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.

Why do we reset the ads every year?

Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.

The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.

How does it work?

The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.

  1. All answers should be in the exact form of:

    [![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]

   [1]: http://image-url
   [2]: http://clickthrough-url

    Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.

  2. The question must always be tagged with the magic tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.

Image requirements

  • The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels
  • 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

Score Threshold

There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.

You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.

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9 Answers 9

Reset to default
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Get a free copy of Power Programming

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  • I got fed up with seeing that twitter ad, so I'm playing around with some different ideas...
    – cormullion
    Commented Jun 5, 2013 at 22:11
  • 1
    Good ideas for all 3! I think I'll delete the twitter one, since it isn't all that useful and increase the odds for the other ads. Btw, please also share these in chat — you'll easily get 6 votes (which is when the ad starts being shown on the main site) that way (see for example all the 10+ votes on the WRI ads here and in the old post)
    – rm -rf Mod
    Commented Jun 8, 2013 at 13:03
  • Good plan - I don't think there are that many keen twitterers here (I'm not one either)... This one has +6/-1...
    – cormullion
    Commented Jun 8, 2013 at 15:29
  • This has +5/0... you must've looked at the Chemistry one by mistake
    – rm -rf Mod
    Commented Jun 8, 2013 at 17:58
  • Oh yeah. Cat walked on my iPad... :)
    – cormullion
    Commented Jun 8, 2013 at 18:16
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    Wouldn't be the first time a cat was involved... ;)
    – rm -rf Mod
    Commented Jun 9, 2013 at 2:52
  • Am I the only one who is driven crazy by the bar bending the wrong way in this image every time I see it?
    – Mr.Wizard Mod
    Commented Nov 30, 2013 at 5:52
  • @Mr.Wizard I wouldn't be surprised if you were... But it is odd, isn't it? Designers consciously or unconsciously choose smiling rather than frowning shapes (eg car radiator grilles) so perhaps they thought a more realistic bar bend looked too sad...
    – cormullion
    Commented Nov 30, 2013 at 8:06
  • @cormullion Yes, I'm probably the least sane around here. :^) I guess that explanation makes sense but a flat bar would have been fine too I think.
    – Mr.Wizard Mod
    Commented Dec 1, 2013 at 11:16
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Browse through our unanswered questions!

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  • P.S. I'll update this roughly every 10 days or so...
    – rm -rf Mod
    Commented Dec 10, 2012 at 17:26
  • Currently it's only 415 and decreasing, thanks to several people's efforts ;-)
    – Szabolcs
    Commented Feb 13, 2013 at 20:55
  • I'm wondering if something similar to this can be applied here?
    – rcollyer
    Commented Jun 25, 2013 at 0:22
  • @rcollyer From what I understand, it uses a loophole in the system (like our uploader) and gets it to serve an image not from i.stack.imgur. Kyle runs a service on something like Amazon EC2 that regularly checks the API and regenerates the image. I remember asking Kyle about it a long time ago, but he refused to tell me how he did it (I understand, because you wouldn't want everyone doing it as well for possible hundreds of other causes).
    – rm -rf Mod
    Commented Jun 25, 2013 at 7:29
  • I'm only seeing "836 questions with no answers" on the linked page. Have people reduced this number or are you allowing for the expected increase and picking a nice number?
    – Mr.Wizard Mod
    Commented Aug 6, 2013 at 22:17
  • @Mr.Wizard You must be on the "no answers" tab... A question that has answers with 0 votes is also technically considered "unanswered" by the system. The number above reflects the total unanswered questions, which currently stands at 902. You can change the tab to "newest" or something else to see this. See this answer if you want to find and review posts that have unupvoted answers.
    – rm -rf Mod
    Commented Aug 6, 2013 at 22:53
  • The link from this ad is to the "no answers" tab; should the ad and the link agree? Also, the unanswered tab currently says 918 for me; why the discrepancy?
    – Mr.Wizard Mod
    Commented Aug 6, 2013 at 22:55
  • @Mr.Wizard The link from this is to the unanswered page... it just remembers whatever tab you were on the last time and will be different for different people. As for the discrepancy, it must be caching. I suspect the dedicated /unanswered tab (that the image links to) is cached, whereas the /questions tab is more recent.
    – rm -rf Mod
    Commented Aug 6, 2013 at 23:06
  • Also, I think only the total is cached, as the dedicated /unanswered page also shows questions as recent as 8 mins ago...
    – rm -rf Mod
    Commented Aug 6, 2013 at 23:08
  • Thanks R.M; as always you seem to better understand the site mechanics.
    – Mr.Wizard Mod
    Commented Aug 6, 2013 at 23:12
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Tagline to show on mouseover

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  • Thanks; I think that looks much better.
    – Mr.Wizard Mod
    Commented Aug 6, 2013 at 22:33
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Mathematica plugin for IntelliJIDEA

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Academia Stack Exchange

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Chemistry - Stack Exchange

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  • 2
    For what it is worth, I'm curious as to why people object to this. We've helped out other infant sites before, so why not this one, too?
    – rcollyer
    Commented Jul 10, 2013 at 16:56
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    +1 from me, but obviously I'm biased.
    – bobthechemist
    Commented Jul 10, 2013 at 21:10
  • @bobthechemist couldn't tell ... :)
    – rcollyer
    Commented Jul 10, 2013 at 21:13
  • @rcollyer maybe it's because the site is plagued by many stupid questions that have little to do with chemistry, or that involve chemistry in a non-rigorous and ill-defined way. This is not at all the fault of (most of) the site membership, but it might be perceived to harm the site's academic reputation, if there is such a thing for SE sites. I don't think I've described it very well, but I guess you know what I mean.
    – Oleksandr R.
    Commented Jul 11, 2013 at 1:54
  • @OleksandrR. Just noticed your comment. I wouldn't go so far as to say they are "stupid" questions as they are "homework" questions that show no effort on the part of the OP. I'm not sure how to (a) foster site participation while (b) knocking down questions that are designed for answers.yahoo.com.
    – bobthechemist
    Commented Oct 1, 2013 at 15:55
  • @bobthechemist it's not so much the homework questions I was referring to, but those that concern what happens if various household substances are mixed, how best to clean one's carpets, cooking, and so on. The ones where someone thinks their question might be about chemistry, without actually knowing what chemistry itself is about. Back when I wrote that comment, they were uncomfortably frequent, but I'm pleased to see that these are getting less and less common compared to proper questions. Perhaps a critical mass of the latter puts the non-chemists off?
    – Oleksandr R.
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 15:54

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