phpAds quirk; only rotating 5 of 52 banners

[wharris]

This driving me nuts. Just installed phpAds after a terrific little free Perl script I was using mysteriously quit working. I have 52 banners in my rotation, all the same size and all given the same number of views and the same keyword. Only 5 randomly selected banners out of 52 show up in the rotation. If I deactivate those, another 5 randmomly selected banners show up - but always only 5 banners. I'm using

view("550x60", 0, "_blank");

to call the banners.

Thanks,
Wayne

[dank]

I can't think what would be causing that, but it couldn't hurt to try phpAdsNew (http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpadsnew/) instead, which fixes a lot of the bugs in phpAds (I switched after about one day of testing).

Dan

[WayneAH]

Dan,

Thanks, I'll try it right away. I thought I had the latest version, since I got it from Tobias's phpwizard.net site. But I am using 1.4.

Weird thing is, it seemed to be working okay before Dexter went down in that every banner logo had at least a few views. But I overwrote all the files on the server with my local files and it didn't help.

Wayne[nbsp]

[dank]

Technically, you do have the newest version.[nbsp][nbsp]It's just that the newest version is so old, other people decided to pick it up and continue the development under a slightly different name.

I think 1.4 had problems with random/sequential banners, but nothing comes to mind that relates to what you're describing.

Dan

[wharris]

Dan,

Downloaded and installed phpAdsNew 2beta1 - describe as "mature." (I can relate to that beta.) Works perfectly. Thanks so much. Your timely suggestion ended several days of grief.

Wayne

[dank]

Excellent, glad to help.[nbsp][nbsp]:)

I haven't tried the v2 beta yet, but it sounds like it should be nice.

Dan

[wharris]

Dan,

2beta1 is a little buggy. Navigating around admin de-activates banners in big bunches. I am having to go back in via telnet to reset them every time I look at stats. Not a major problem, but I would stay with your current version if you're not having that problem with your ealrier version.

Wayne[nbsp]

[Hunkorama417]

phpAds has a weird selection algorithm using shuffle() and looping through the array. From my own experience I found that shuffle() isn't as random as I want it to be.
------------------
Andrew
www.digi-FX.net (http://www.digi-FX.net)
andrew@digi-fx.net

[wharris]

Whew! It wasn't navigating around admin that was causing my banners in phpAdsNew to expire. The counter is buggy. I had set everybody to 50000 views with an expiration date of 2005-12-31, and every banner was expiring after one vew. Now I've got views, clicks and expire set to "Unlimited" (numerical values of -1,-1, 0000-00-00 in the clients table), and all is well again.

Thanks Andrew for the explanation and thanks again Dan for the advice that got me out of the morass.

Wayne
--Dreaming of a life beyond banner rotation--

[dank]

I actually usally wait a post-beta release or two before installing a program; give it time to work out the changes and fully test everything.

I set everything to unlimited, so it's quite possible the same bug exists in 1.9.2 and I just hadn't uncovered it...

Dan

[wharris]

Dan,

Do you use phpAdsNew's automail feature? If you do, is it pretty straightforward to set up the cron? Seems like this could be a very powerful customer relations tool.

Wayne

[dank]

I haven't tried it.[nbsp][nbsp]I still do a lot of things manually, just to make sure they're done right.[nbsp][nbsp]:)

Dan