OC tiers and policies

[boneskull]

I began this in the Gitter chat, but I think this is maybe a better place for discussion--unless you'd rather take it private.

A few of our "sponsors" are rather dubious companies that are likely looking for a cheap way to optimize SEO.

I don't love this. Here are some ideas:

1. Increase the cost of displaying a logo on the site
2. Manually approve sponsors by some vetting process. Sponsors that are not approved will get refunds.
3. Write up a policy regarding what we'll link to and what we won't. For example, there's nothing stopping a neo-nazi site from sponsoring us and causing a logo and link to be displayed.
4. A policy that we should add, regardless: we reserve the right to remove a logo from our page at any time for any reason.

Some of this may be good to discuss with OC as they are more experienced with these issues (than I am, at least).

cc @Munter @juergba @outsideris @craigtaub

[craigtaub]

Increasing the cost does not seem the right direction in my eyes. Writing up a policy sounds sensible, altho we'd definitely want to take advice from OC on how to define ethical/acceptable.

On the other hand I had a quick look and could not identify a dubious company, a couple which I feel unlikely to be using "mocha".
Also doesn't the link on mocha site point to opencollective.com/mochajs/sponsor/<id>/website, would that redirect be helpful for SEO?

[boneskull]

there are several online casinos in there. I didn’t look too closely. others are simply SEO companies.

the redirect thru OC doesn’t help; it will just show that the visitor came thru OC. if we use the direct link, there will be a referrer header from mochajs.org

but more fundamentally it’s user-hostile, since hovering over the link does not show a proper URL and there’s no further information about the company, whose logo you may not know

[craigtaub]

I only checked a couple so missed the casinos. Not good.

[outsideris]

I didn't check all our sponsors. Casinos or some problematic companies(like cryptocurrency scam?) are not good for us.
I'm not sure about a dubious company for optimizing SEO. I don't like that kind of business as well but I don't know if we should reject their sponsoring because all sponsoring has marketing purposes.

If we write a policy sensible, it is good. So, discussing it with OC is good.

[boneskull]

OK, OC got back to me about the weird data. Our tiers are basically bogus:

• "Backers" is intended for individuals
• "Sponsors" is intended for companies
• and there's a third "custom" donation

Companies and individuals are mixed together in all three tiers.

So I think maybe, for now, we don't differentiate between these, because they are meaningless. I suspect something like what webpack does (scroll down) will work for us, where we display everything, but at some level of contribution you get a bigger icon. I can recommend what some "tiers" would be once I have a look at our top contributors.

---

Regarding policies, I haven't heard back yet. I think most of the OC team was on vacation recently... they don't seem to be very responsive atm.

[boneskull]

Update:

actually I think we can keep the tiers. there's another field I missed which tells us if a donator is an organization, individual, or another collective.

[boneskull]

I've slogged thru the sponsors, and this is the list of account slugs that I think we should ban

[
  "cheap-writing-service",
  "emailmarketingservices-io",
  "device-tricks1",
  "my-true-media",
  "yiannakis-ttafounas-ttafounas",
  "writerseperhour",
  "casinotop-com",
  "casino-topp",
  "casinoutanreg",
  "supercazino-ro",
  "igor-noskov",
  "blue-link-seo",
  "casino-online",
  "domywriting",
  "writemypaper4me",
  "trust-my-paper",
  "seowebsitetraffic-net"
]

these are mainly casinos, sketchy SEO sites & sketchy essay-writing services. if you want a complete dump containing the URLs and more info, I can provide it.

[boneskull]

(the data is public afaik, so anyone could grab it via OC's API)

[boneskull]

Ref: mochajs/mocha#4272

[boneskull]

Regarding blacklisted sponsors:

These sponsors should (?) potentially get refunds, or else OC may incur chargebacks. All we can do atm is disable showing the logos. OC needs to do some work to solve the refund process on their end, though.

Ref: opencollective/opencollective#2006