Wikimedia RU uses a site hosted on WMF servers as its official site - http://ru.wikimedia.org
Though it's quite useful for readers and editors (they can use SUL and familiar environment for participation) it puts lots of limitations on our activities, some of them are really blocking our development.
For example, we are promoting this website via social-media, our blog posts, news, etc.; even Google Adwords grant is used for bringing attention to the site.
Nevertheless, we can't use convenient and efficient ways to convert all that readers/visitors into quality:
- we have no information about actual number of visitors and efficiency of our outreach - see T91963
- we are not able to convert it into donations that are required for our activities.
Fundraising is a difficult issue in Russia and while we had a number of conversations with WMF on different levels, we decided to put our new proposal to Phabricator not to discuss it with all relevant parties one by one but to invite WMF responsible people to this discussion and approval process.
We want to use CentralNotice banner at ru.wikimedia.org website as a fundraising banner: we are not speaking about banners in Wikipedia or other projects, we want to use it only on our website.
We can't use PEG/FDC because external transfers are prohibited by the government and donations from Russian editors\readers is the only legal way to get fundraising.
We invested a lot into promotion of ru.wikimedia.org and it would be a disaster to learn that we can't use it for fundraising now...
So, I am cc'ing relevant departments of WMF and am waiting for your comments.
Linar