Octopus Deploy Will Soon Be Sponsoring Server Fault!

Question

We're excited to announce that Octopus Deploy will be sponsoring Server Fault for the next year beginning very soon! These types of partnerships that help us bring more resources to our communities would not be possible without your hard work and dedication and we're extremely thankful for and proud of everything that you've done and continue to do.

You've got questions about what this means, we're sure - and we're here to answer 'em! We've anticipated a few which we'll explore below:

How will the sponsorship be displayed?

Good question! The sponsorship will be shown in top right of the header of the site in a manner that's similar to the mockup below:

The color of the logo might be different, we're still working out the final details, but it will be subtle and unobtrusive.

Octopus Deploy will continue to run ads in existing ad spaces on Server Fault during the sponsorship period.

What else changes?

That's easy: absolutely nothing.

Quoting from the MSE post linked in the introduction:

First — sponsors do not own these Q&A sites. Sponsors work alongside our communities who ultimately build these sites. Communities ask the questions; communities create the tags; communities conduct elections as they do now, and we are not renaming our current sites like a garish sport stadium to the highest bidder. Any ads a sponsor submits still have go through our crazy-strict ad editorial process… as it has always been. Companies do not have access to personal data, and all Q&A content remains irrevocably licensed under Creative Commons for sharing and attribution.

Sponsorships are a tool that our clients can use to let folks who would be interested in their products know about them.

When does this start, how long does it last?

The exact launch date is yet to be precisely determined, but we're aiming for the first week of November, if not a few days sooner. The sponsorship period last for a year from the date we go live.

I think I found a design glitch / bug.

Please report it as a separate bug. Thank you!

I have another question or concern.

Leave an answer below (I know it might seem odd to leave a question as an answer) and we'll do our best to answer you.

Thank you again, everyone! Again, this would not have been possible without the huge amount of work you've all put into making Server Fault so successful.

Answer 1

👋🏻 Hi Server Fault community,

I’m the founder of Octopus Deploy. I’m a developer by background and started Octopus in 2011 as a project in my spare time. We’re bootstrapped, not VC funded, but we have grown to the point of employing 75 people. We’re mostly an Australian company but employ folks in the US and UK too.

I won’t insult your intelligence - we’re obviously sponsoring the site in hopes it will raise some awareness of us and what we do, particularly in the IT Ops space where I think we are doing some innovative things. We don’t have any full time marketers at Octopus, just myself and a couple of other technical people who I roped into dabbling with marketing from time to time, trying to raise a bit of awareness. In fact I edited the logo image for the sponsorship and designed and wrote the ad copy (and most of the website copy) myself because we really haven’t figured out how to “do marketing properly”.

Part of the reason we like sponsoring Server Fault is that if we’re going to advertise (and the techie in me still struggles with the idea of advertising), we’d rather do it on actual technical communities rather than random sites based on all the data Google collects about you. In other words this feels like the most ethical kind of advertising option.

I have personally found Server Fault useful many times in the past (I still code) and while I haven’t posted here much, I was pretty active on Stack Overflow years ago. A number of folks on our team hang out on various Stack Exchange sites too. We know that this is a community, not any ordinary website.

We’re going to run a competition inside our company, with a prize for whoever can earn the most upvotes on our team on Server Fault by answering questions. We have lots of smart technical folks so I am sure they will be good quality answers. Hopefully this is a way we can give back to the community (or make our contribution somewhat neutral at least 😁). If you think this is a bad idea or see it causing issues let me know.

I really do hope our ads aren’t distracting or offensive (more than any other ad at least). If there’s anything about what we’re doing that you have a concern about, post here and I’ll keep an eye on the thread, or email me directly - my firstname.lastname at our web domain. Thanks.

Answer 2

Is this an exclusive sponsorship?