the forkgram and mercurygram programs contain advertising in channels, bots, and search. this is not mentioned on the respective pages when downloading the software. for the sake of user transparecy, i think the anti-feature tag should be applied.
example screenshot below:
Can you show us in the source code where the developer inject ads?
If the ads are part of the channel (or network), there’s nothing to warn about… don’t join those channels.
the ads are injected by the telegram developers and are present in the telegram source and consequently in the sources of forkgram and mercurygram. for example, there’s a class for advertising in bots: TelegramAndroid/TMessagesProj/src/main/java/org/telegram/ui/bots/BotAdView.java at dev · forkgram/TelegramAndroid · GitHub
the developers of forkgram expressed that they are not removing the advertising to stay compliant with telegram’s terms in this issue.
the ads are added on behalf of the channel/bot owners through the telegram’s advertising network to users who do not have a subscription, not directly by the channels as a regular message.
I see, open a MR then to add this anti-feature
opened:
It’s hard to blame those app devs for trying to comply with Telegram ToS since if they do not do that, they are potentially putting their user’s accounts at risk. Telegram will often kill off accounts with no warning, no explanation and no recourse if they decide that the user is violating their ToS.
Like it or not, the ads are a standard Telegram “feature”. (I don’t like them either, but if the choice is between that or having my account, all my contacts, chats, personal channels, groups and history unrecoverably deleted, I’ll either put up with them or use their paid account.)
Yeah, screw telegram. I’d rather use SpaceBar.
It’s hard to blame those app devs for trying to comply with Telegram ToS since if they do not do that, they are potentially putting their user’s accounts at risk. Telegram will often kill off accounts with no warning, no explanation and no recourse if they decide that the user is violating their ToS.
i’m not telling the devs what they should or should not do, that’s entirely up to them, just putting the detail out there that the developers explicitly claimed that the misfeature will stay, so the tag should apply.
it’s not uncommon that clients distributed through f-droid do not have advertisements in them. if i knew in advance that the software will non-consensually advertise to me then it would have influenced my decision to download it, and i believe it might be the case for other people going forward as well.
