Arivertisements FAQ

This page answers frequently asked questions only about the official Arivertisements instance at ad.ari.lt or ad.arija664fy4c6zhfbsytbqcbz5gcc3qjuwaz4ue6cium5c5fo2fgakyd.onion - we cannot guarantee these answers stand true to themselves for unofficial instances. For more information see the home page.

How does Arivertisements work?

It simply serves static images with some simple copyright information, and also allows the authors of the image to link to some site. That's about it. Simple, indie, silly - similar to the more widely-known Johnvertisements.

Is Arivertisements an advertising platform?

No. Never was and never will be. Read: GitHub issue easylist/easylist#23356: "MISCATEGORISATION: ad.ari.lt is not an advertising platform & does not track its users.".

Does Arivertisements track you?

No. Arivertisements does not track people. All logs are sanitised and kept at a minimum (just for system functionality and prevention of abuse, read more about it in the privacy policy of ari.lt), no user agents are kept, no IP addresses are associated with any sort of activity, no fingerprinting or tracking is performned, JavaScript serving is avoided at all costs, etc. - Arivertisements is nearly as private as simply requesting an image online from a 3rd party (in this case - ad.ari.lt). Moreover, Arivertisements is fully open source, so you can verify anything that goes on in the back-end, front-end, and what images are served.

Is there an API?

Yes. There is a JSON-based API for extra silliness.

Does Arivertisements accept corporate ADs?

No. Arivertisements is strictly an indie project for silly indie people, projects, and websites to share silly images and other creations with the world. We will never accept any corporate or promotional material in our image roster. Also: our images, content, code and content are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and AGPL 3.0 licenses, making the project unfriendly to corporate entities legally.

What measures does Arivertisements take to protect my security and privacy?

• Strict & explicit PsP, RP CSP, CORS, COOP, COEP, and CORP
• Strict origin management
• Strict moderation
• Forced HSTS preload
• Secure HTTPS settings
• Logging kept to a minimum
• Use of restricted iframes
• In-memory storage of ephemeral data
• TOR support
• Opt-in leaderboard
• All required cookies are session-based, short-lived, prefixed, secure, HTTP-only, and cryptographically signed
• Encrypting/obfuscating of data where relevant (e.g., email addresses of contributors)
• Avoiding all telemetry and tracking
• Rate limiting endpoints to prevent abuse
• Cryptographic signing in the source code repository
• Hardening server configuration for security
• Using Alpine Linux - a secure, small, simple, and lightweight Linux distribution as the server OS
• Sticking by strict philosophical standards for privacy, security, and dedication to the FOSS community

How does Arivertisements ensure performance?

• Caching of images, pages, markup, etc.
• Hot-reloading of images
• Minification and optimisation of relevant assets
• Modern HTTP protocol (HTTP/3 and HTTP/2) support
• QUIC transport layer support
• Performance-enhanced server configuration
• IPv4 and IPv6 support
• Gzip compression support
• Multi-process application
• Rate limiting (prevents abuse and system crashes)
• Lazy iframes & image loading (meaning the load time of Arivertisements does not impact you!)

How can I contribute?

To contribute images, see the home page "Arivertising Yourself" section. It lists three ways you can contribute - the 3rd one is likely the easiest :) To contribute to the project at all, you can simply embed Arivertisements on your site!

How are "renders" counted in the leaderboard?

The renders are the count of valid Arivertisement embed requests a user makes. For a counter to increment, the following conditions must be met:

1. You have a from GET parameter set
2. The from GET parameter is a valid domain or URL
3. The user has not received an Arivertisement in the last 5 minutes (based on session cookie)