Advertising on the dashboard

I’d much rather not add notifications like those, either. But, we receive too little in donations (roughly $250 a year) to maintain the plugin without income from other sources. The v4.2.0 update took over 400 hours to build; the number of pizzas and coffee consumed depleted all donations in a single update.

I also understand your goal with this review: “Do not add them again, and don’t go bigger!” But, they’re here to stay until www.ads-software.com provides us an alternative. I will never add anything to the plugin I wouldn’t like to see in other plugins.

Since TSF is entirely white-label, and since WordPress provides us no API for marketing (such as a “has premium” button), we rely on at least some form of marketing we implement ourselves.

I never visit the SEO Settings page on my clients’ sites because that page needs visiting only once per site. With this in mind, a notification there wouldn’t yield any results.

So, I chose to output a notification on various non-essential pages. This notification tries to stay out of your way. It’s only shown when all these conditions are met:

1. Constant TSF_DISABLE_SUGGESTIONS isn’t true.
2. User upgrades database version.
3. Notification isn’t dismissed already.
4. User can install plugins.
5. Notification is shown fewer than 3 times (totally, to all users).
6. User is not on an essential (e.g., post-edit) page.
7. A week has not yet passed since the notification was registered (during TSF database upgrade).
8. Sale isn’t over.

Here’s more to that philosophy.

Still, if you have a better alternative than a notification, please do let me know.

To close, if you never wish to see any non-essential notifications of TSF again, please add this to your wp-config.php file:

define( 'TSF_DISABLE_SUGGESTIONS', true );

I get it, it’s tough, and your various responses to this type of complaint serves to illustrate how tough it can be from your perspective. I’m just fed up with the sheer amount of abuse the notification system gets. I’ve had the misfortune of signing into client dashboards where well over half of my viewport is infested with ads and notifications. I build my sites with as few plugins as possible and they often still suffer from notifications where notifications shouldn’t be.

One of the main reasons I started switching clients to your plugin wasn’t even the features. It was to get away from how much Yoast likes to skirt the line of what’s acceptable and what isn’t in their plugin. Not that your plugin suffers from needing features, just saying.

I don’t know. The whole thing sucks. I strongly dislike marketing notifications. I also dislike that you need to use them because a lack of other options is available.