[wp-hackers] Advertising on Plugin Option Pages

[Jackson Whelan]

On 9/8/11 4:06 PM, Otto wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Jackson Whelan<jw at jacksonwhelan.com>  wrote:
>> I stumbled across a plugin from the repository today with Google AdSense
>> banners on the options page. With a call to action above it - 'Click here if
>> you like this plugin.' - to boot!
>>
>> Obviously this is a little tacky (aside from violating AdSense's TOS), but I
>> was just wondering if there's a policy here? Or maybe this is more common
>> than I realize.
>>
>> Not trying to rat anyone out, just genuinely curious.
> In general, things like banner or text link advertising should not be
> anywhere in a plugin, including on its settings screen. Advertising on
> settings screens is generally ineffective anyway, as ideally users
> rarely visit these screens, and the advertising is low quality because
> the ad-systems cannot see the page content to determine good ads. So
> they’re best just left off entirely. Putting links back to your own
> site or to your social-network-system of choice is fine. Furthermore,
> if the plugin does include advertising from a third party service, it
> must default to completely disabled, in order to prevent tracking
> information from being collected from the user without their consent.
>
> TLDR: No, it's not kosher.
Thanks for the replies.

I'll go ahead and drop a line to plugins at wordpress.org.

This one* in particular does indeed load working AdSense banners on the 
option pages, without the ability to disable.

I for one don't enjoy seeing behavior tracking scripts from third 
parties loaded in my wp-admin

- Jackson

* http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/highslide-integration/