Cormac Moylan

Vanilla, the popular-ish Open Source forum software from Lussumo, has announced that it’s to include sponsored links in each download as of the 19th of August.

As of yesterday, I’ve placed three plain-text links into the side panel of Vanilla directly below the “About Vanilla” information box.

Mark, the founder of Lussumo, justifies the inclusion of sponsored links by stating that the resulting revenue will pay for the ‘lion’s share of costs associated with giving Vanilla away for free’.

I have no problem with sponsored links in Open Source software as long as the user is educated on how to remove them if he so wishes. Google’s stance on paid links is well documented at this stage and it would be an absolute disaster if the user had no control over which neighborhood they were linking to.

Fortunately, you can remove the paid links by editing a settings.php file within Vanilla.

Mark has put a lot of hard work into Vanilla over the last few years and I hope he makes a nice sum of money from this sponsorship.

I’ve been looking into Vanilla myself recently for one of my websites and I have been very impressed with the Vanilla package as a whole. The markup used is excellent, Vanilla uses a 100% table-less semantic layout and is super quick to render. The core of an unziped Vanilla installation is very bare, no WYISWYG editor for example, but there are plenty of extensions available which can adequately pimp your vanilla. This coupled with a very responsive community forum, makes Vanilla my current forum software of choice.

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