The donation button is fine and so were the links too!
And you didn't have to bother with those morons, keep up the good work. :)

Congrats on this decision! I just donated and I wish you best of luck developing Vanilla.

I'm with Matt, great move. Have another donation (albeit significantly smaller) to help out.

I'm particularly impressed that Matt would donate since Automattic produces a competing open source forum application. Great to see one project supporting another, even if they are in the same market!

The most important thing to me is you keep building great software! It being open source is bonus.

Great new! I can remove the nofollow now for the vanilla link.

Great that you can stand your ground.

That's Great! This's the real good news to vanilla.

I'm thinking of adding a forum to my website; now that this is sponsored-link-free, I might try it. Thanks!

YAY 4 U
I LOVE UR WORK
KEEP IT UP BUD

Bravo, Mark! I hope that the people who use your software find it fit to support you in your efforts!

Good move Mark. I sympathize with your struggle to earn a living making software like Vanilla. It's remarkable how many people think they know exactly how you should run your business, despite the fact that they don't write software, let alone earn a living at it. That a few remarkably successful projects make it look easy doesn't help much either. But Matt's right: letting the SEO guys hide stuff in your software isn't going to help.

Ignore the flame emails; those people aren't your audience anyway. Watch what the successful projects do and learn from them. And good luck.

Things happen for good! Your adding the links (and subsequent post from Matt) not only brought donations including those from Matt and Chris, it also created awareness about Vanilla among those who were unaware of it (including me). Well Congratulations.

I would love to create a Hindi translation for Vanilla.

Excellent news, nice move :)

And it's so nice to see the community helping itself out, kudos to Matt. This is what I like about the web and Open Source - such a nice bunch of people.

Vanilla has come around a way long enough to deserve some rewards. Might very soon get one without links. Thanks for all you have done, Mark!

In one hand I'm quite happy that Matt donated to support you in light of this but on the other hand I'm quite dissapointed that this didn't work out for you Mark.

The links were not intrusive and were easily removed (one line in the config file) and could potentially support Lussumo better than a donation system could ever do.

I feel disheartened when attempts like this get looked down upon by others and only shows to me that people expect too much from open source software.

Mark: I promise when my expenses clear up I'll donate -- I did for the Macbook drive and I'll make sure I do it again. You deserve it so I hope you haven't had a change of mind about the whole thing in the wake of all of this.

Keep up the great work man, you're an inspiration.

A thousand dollars, jesus. Well deserved!

I would love to donate to the project, I am an extremely poor student. Instead of donating I have tried to donate some time writing and updating extensions and helping out on the forums.

I think this is a wonderful project, and that you do a great job managing things, Mark, it isn't easy to put a lot of work into something and to not capitalise on it.

Hopefully I will find a spare few quid in my account at some point over the next few months, and I will make a token donation to give you my thanks in a form that is spendable.

Oo, btw, you don't have to approve this comment, but just to let you know that the link to Matt Mullenweg's site (photomatt.net) has the wrong TLD in your post =)

Congrats Mark, well deserved.

Now, we are waiting for "Link free blogroll" version of Wordpress from Matt Mullenweg

I'm glad that Vanilla is link free, I'll think about using it again.

Anderson is wrong though (comment above), because the blogroll links aren't adverts. They're simply a starting place for your own roll.

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