Funding and sponsorship
What pays for the Commons, what that buys, and what it explicitly does not buy.
The site is funded by a small number of clearly labelled sponsor placements, plus volunteer time. There is no membership fee, no paywall, no affiliate arrangement and no commission on anything.
Who sponsors the Commons
Independent testing laboratories and one manufacturer. They appear as labelled units in the page rail and between list sections, and they are marked as sponsored. The other outbound links are the storefront links on vendor pages, also marked nofollow and sponsored; nobody pays for either.
What sponsorship buys
Placement. That is the entire list.
What it does not buy
- Any influence over a topic, a reply, or whether either stays up.
- Any influence over a vendor documentation page — including a sponsor's own. Sponsors' pages carry their unfavourable entries like everyone else's.
- Any influence over a maintained document, a marked solution, or a moderation decision.
- Advance sight of anything. No sponsor previews content.
- Removal of criticism. A sponsor that asks for a post taken down gets told no, and the request gets posted in
meta.
Where the money goes
Hosting, the domain, and the occasional independent test the community pools for. Staff are unpaid. There is no company behind the site and no salary being drawn from it.