Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Fun in the sidebar

A few months ago, ketralnis came up with an interesting idea: When we have unused ad space, why not use it for something nice? It's a way of saying thanks to our community, it's an incentive to turn off AdBlock (here's how to do that, if you'd like to see what you've been missing), and it changes the ad box from "The Horrible Commercialism Zone that nobody ever wants to look at" to "A sometimes commercial, often funny, usually amusing part of reddit."

The first batch of "reddit fun" non-ads were games. Surely you've seen Super Fill-Up, and Ratmaze, and the one with the disappearing colored squares (protip for colorblind redditors: click the eye in the corner).

Next, we wanted to add in a rotation of nice photos — cute animals, inspiring landscapes, funny things, you know the deal. For the initial batch, we went to Flickr and searched for "cute animals" images under the Creative Commons license. There were some great results we used to kick things off, but it seemed more reddity to start getting them from the /r/photography community. There have been many, many great submissions, and we've been running them ever since. Here's how to submit your own:
  1. Crop and resize it down to 300x224
  2. Upload it to imgur
  3. Decide where you want people to be taken when they click it (ideally, the photo's Flickr page)
  4. Send us a PM with both links
(Please follow those instructions exactly, as it allows the process to be automated.)

As of today, this program is better than ever: First off, we're unveiling an archive at /r/NonAds where you can look through all the old selections. Second, we have a new trophy for the selected photographers.

Congratulations and thanks to our newest batch of award winners!
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