Subject: Re: Dumping the banner ads

From: "Dave Page" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 08:20:36 +0100

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] 
> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Josh Berkus
> Sent: 10 May 2006 07:19
> To: PostgreSQL WWW
> Subject: [pgsql-www] Dumping the banner ads
> 
> Marc, could you please acquaint us with the outstanding 
> obligations with the banner ads?  Whom have we promised what? 
>  Who will we owe refunds to?

I cannot speak for the paid ones, but we have always offered our mirror
providers a free ad - there certainly should be a few of those still in
the system. We might find we cheese off a few of them by removing the
ads.

/D

---

From: "Marc G. Fournier" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 09:24:04 -0300 (ADT)

> the system. We might find we cheese off a few of them by removing the

Right now, we have active:

CommandPrompt    - Mirror/Free
EnterpriseDB     - Expires June 18th
ExtendDB         - Expires May 15th
Navicat          - Expires July 4th
Pervasive        - Mirror/Free
PgAdmin          - OSS Project/Free
Sam's Publishing - Exchange program for 'Show Books'

Navicat runs until July 4th, everyone else expires earlier then that ... 
so we can scheduale dumping them on the 4th of July ...

Personally, the use of MySQL vs PostgreSQL for banner ads is 'using the 
right tool for the job' ... Banner ads aren't "data integrity heavy", who 
cares if you lose a click or impression here or there in the stats?

Just to put things into perspective ... the banners used to run on a 10 
line, homegrown script that did nothing more then keep track of # of 
impressions ... pg_autovacuum ran almost continuously on the one table 
that did "UPDATE counter SET cnt = cnt + 1 WHERE banner_id = #" ... and 
the counter table was purely "banner_id, cnt" ... switching over to 
phpAdsNew allows ppl login to an interface and see extended statistics 
like countries ppl are clicking in from, etc ... and performing better 
then the '10 line script' did ...

As for Josh's comment about "switching to a mysql platform while we 
weren't looking" ... nobody ever asked what the backend was ... everyone 
was complaining that the banners weren't loading fast enough, so I fixed 
that situation *while* extending the functionality of the system so that 
more detailed statistics were being maintained ... and I wasn't going to 
lie about what we were using ...

Matteo asked what we were using on -advocacy, and, IMHO, it would have 
been suspicious if, after you pointedly asked me to confirm, the query 
went un-answered ...

PostgreSQL is a steady workhorse, but there are at least 2 things that 
I've found it doesn't do well: banner ads and bayesian database :(

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: [email-masked]           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

---

From: "Joshua D. Drake" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 08:05:19 -0700

> the system. We might find we cheese off a few of them by removing the

ALthough it is important that we keep our obligations, it does seem odd 
that the mirror would ask the requirement. Most mirrors will mirror FOSS 
projects for free...

Hmmm... that is usually FTP sites though. Are we talking about WWW?

Joshua D. Drake

-- 

            === The PostgreSQL Company: Command Prompt, Inc. ===
      Sales/Support: +1.503.667.4564 || 24x7/Emergency: +1.800.492.2240
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                     http://www.commandprompt.com/

---

From: "Joshua D. Drake" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 08:23:47 -0700

> CommandPrompt    - Mirror/Free

Well I have mentioned in the past we don't require this. Of course if we 
keep them I want one :) but otherwise you have no problem from us.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

--

---

From: Robert Treat <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 08:01:32 -0400

> Sam's Publishing - Exchange program for 'Show Books'

Could osmeone share the details of this program with me? I might be able to 
work out a similar arrangement with Apress depending on the details.

-- 
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

---

From: Josh Berkus <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 09:34:13 -0700

Robert,

> work out a similar arrangement with Apress depending on the details.

Actually, you can't, since we're eliminating the banner ads.

But what happened is that Pearson offered to ship us a box and a half of 
Korry's book in exchange for a banner ad.  They did this in 2002 as 
well, and we gave away those books at LWE-SF and at JPUG.

I'll get in touch with Kit and ship the books so that we can have them 
for upcomming conferences.

--Josh