Vanilla is no longer sweet.

The forum package Vanilla now has paid advertising links built into the download, according to its developer Mark.

Even though I don't use Vanilla, I think it's a decent program with a great goal. It's not phpbb-ish, but rather has a focus on the topics rather than the forum containers (much like bbPress. I do believe Mark has done a lot of good work on his projects.

But embedding ads in the open source project just doesn't seem right. Now I know that hosting is expensive, and Mark foots the bill for Vanilla, but I still don't think I can recommend this product any more. (Now you could turn it on in the admin section, I can get deal with that. But to turn it off you need to add a line to a config file.) And wouldn't this make the program Adware instead of freeware?

I guess this is a case of doing what you have to do to get by. And ads do bring in money. I just wish it didn't come down to embedding links into the source.

That just seems so dirty.

This article was written by david and published on
August 21, 2007 at 3:48am.
The article was given the following tags:

• forums
• internet
• open source
• vanilla