WordPress MU

forgive me for my terrible english but i wanted to share something with the community and i hope it can help
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well , i'm no coder so i can't participate in the wonderful volunteering work done here but i have something to share that might help some of you monetizing your WPMU installation i'm planning to do on my own WPMU installation
it won't bring you thousands of US$ but it will pay for your morning coffee at least
no user will like to see advertisement on a blog s/he gets from you while s/he can get it without any ADs with much more stability on wordpress.com for example.
so i think it will be of some benefits if you put your AD in the user's dashboard - specially if you r running niche blog host - which means more targeted advertisements to be placed
just open wp-admin folder then admin-footer.php and admin-header.php to put your advertisement code there
i didn't try google adsense but it will not pay much on those position cuz of the crawling of contents will be away from your niche , so it will be good places to sell your ad placements directly - maybe to use AdBrite with reserved price or affiliate marketing there -
it won't pay you that much unless you have thousands of users so you can sell your CPM

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i want to suggest somethings which in my opinion is must to have in WPMU installation to improve it

1- in Core : to get an option which makes the site admin control the new signups - approve , disapprove , block , spam - from within site admin panel the same as disabling new registeration

2- mu-plugin : recaptcha , http://recaptcha.net , it's used by big companies , facebook,twitter..etc , and it's on no huge load on ur server as it depends on their API - hope i got it right - for the current time i'm testing its single WP plugin as mu-plugin on offline site and it works for comments but don't know how it will act when i go online and i think it will be wonderful if it could be put on registration forms, for those who don't know how it looks like and how it works you can see it here http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html and it's working to improve the http://www.archive.org/ project which is something good to be with , and they have a mailhide spam protection too http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/ so i think it's a big deal for WPMU community to have it working on COMMENTS FORMS all over the system AND signup form , forgot password, and after X number of wrong passwords provided by the user
you can get more information about their plugins here http://recaptcha.net/resources.html

i know i write in a terrible english but i hope you got my idea

The control registrations plugin already exists. To be honest though, what makes a signup spam? You really can't tell from just looking at an email address and a title. There used to be a volunteer here in the forums who told a story once about how he went around with the Blogdesk creator about getting an account on the blogdesk support forums but the creator kept marking his account as spam.

Captchas discriminate against those with sight and vision problems, those behind certain types of firewalls, and those poor souls who get their internet connection via poorly setup proxy servers. (ie Comcast users, those living in Singapore and Hong Kong, etc.) That's not a viable solution. There's also cases coming up through the courts surrents that may make them against at ADA here in the United States.

You may want to search the forums as both of your ideas have been discussed previously as some length.

Sorry to burst your bubble their xfvdk, or whatever, but I tell you what, if it comes down to blocking 90% of spam/splogs with a captcha vice pissing off a couple of couple of people, that captcha is going to win every time.

Most sites here aren't for a brick and mortar store, nor for the federal government. Therefore, as personal creations or even online only businesses, are not subject to the ADA.

Whether it is ethical or not is another debate, but a lot of people out there could care less about fractions of a percent of their traffic.

well , i'm not american to know about the ADA nor federal acts although i think i have to get into those stuff at some stage - did some google and found something about people with disabilities , am i right ? - actually even if i do spamming stuff or drug stores i won't go to jail , we don't have laws about that here in egypt :-D
so bad i have some ethics :-(

but when it comes to online blogging , i really don't know what's violating the people with disabilities rights when it come to captcha for example
the one who are capable to open a blog and manage it i assume s/he can click on refresh button for the captcha or the speaker icon near it to hear it , it's not something degrading their rights at all.
i think it's something protecting them and others from being part of a network of blogs full of viagra links
i look at this point as it's respecting the people on your service not to make them part of all of this and not making it available for bots and scammers

forgive my insistence on that point but it will be a very good help if we got mu plugin that contains recaptcha service , it's a service you can depend on and i tried it with drupal and SP wp and worked fine for a year now
http://recaptcha.net/security.html

we already have captchas for the installation here on wpmudev.org , but those captchas are kinda weak or doesn't have the power of recaptcha which is already used everywhere online for nearly all scripts - except the wpmu -

one good thing i saw on defensio forums , they promised they will provide wpmu version of their plugin
hope they do it
defensio is free for a certain level but once your site grows it will ask for some of your revenue ;-)
i use it with recaptcha on my sites now :-D

Well captchas don't work effectively all the time, I know that. it won't stop splogs. Also, I believe Donncha did say it wouldn't be rolled into core.

well andrea , at least it will reduce some , that's what it's all about , to reduce some of splogs
i understand it won't be in core , but it would be great to find it as a plugin , that's all
anyway i hope the monetizing suggestion would help some of you guys , at least it will pay back the time you spent replying me on the forums :-D