Introduction

We updated the Revive Adserver Hosted edition to the most recent software version 5.1. In this blog post, you can read about the changes and enhancements that are most important to you as a subscriber to this service.

Dear recipient,

You, or someone pretending to be you, recently requested that your Revive Adserver password be reset.

If this request was made by you, then you can reset the password for your username ‘{username}’ by clicking on the following link:

<link appears here>

If you submitted the password reset request by mistake, or if you didn’t make a request at all, simply ignore this email. No changes have been made to your password and the password reset link will expire automatically.

If you continue to receive these password reset mails, then it may indicate that someone is attempting to gain access to your username. Make sure to always use a safe and random password, do not reuse passwords between multiple systems, and consider changing your password at regular intervals.

Deactivating accounts

When a subscriber of the Revive Adserver Hosted edition cancels their subscription, the service expires at the end of the month. Frequently, we notice that subscribers who have cancelled, forget to remove the ad server tags from their websites. For such cases, we now have the ability to set an account to inactive. The system will no longer display ads but instead it will show a message that the ad server account has been terminated.

Non-existent zone IDs

When a subscriber to Revive Adserver Hosted edition uses an ad server code on their site for a zone ID that does not exist, or that no longer exists after they’ve cancelled, our system will output a message to indicate that the ad request is invalid because the zone ID does not exist.

Inventory items can no longer be deleted

Through feedback from users and subscribers at Revive Adserver Hosted edition, we learned that it was too easy to accidentally delete items, and users weren’t always aware that this also deleted any and all statistics associated with that item.

For example, if a user deletes a zone, this deletes the statistics of the zone, and as a result also the statistics of all banners ever delivered through that zone. Since banner statistics sum into campaign statistics, this would have the unwanted effect of incomplete data for campaigns, which are often the basis for invoicing to customers (advertisers). It could also have the unexpected effect of re-activating campaigns that had previously expired when they reached their defined impression target.

In addition, since the statistics in a Revive Adserver Hosted edition are the basis for the invoicing, removing items and thus their statistics, means that the costs for the account are no longer accurate. We have observed several cases of subscribers gaming the costs by running (large) campaigns, and then deleting them just before the end of the month to avoid detection.

For all of these reasons, we’ve removed the ability to delete inventory items like campaigns, banners, or zones.

Change for geotargeting in South Africa

There has been a change in the ISO standard coding for two geographic subdivisions in South Africa. The code for ZA-GT was changed to ZA-GP, and ZA-NL was changed to ZA-KZN. In Revive Adserver v5.1 we’ve implemented this change as well. Any banners that use the codes that have been phased out will have to be changed manually to use the new codes. These banners will simply not be eligible for delivery until this change has been made.

Always up to date

As a subscriber at Revive Adserver Hosted edition, you can rest assured that you’re always running the most recent version of the software. You won’t have to do anything, the software is always updated by our time.