Tracking - Banner advertisements

Note: This feature is implemented in Silent Wings Viewer 1.10. It will not work with earlier versions

If you are running a tracking event server, you have the possibility to show banner ads in the viewer. This has been implemented to help getting sponsors for such events. Currently, this only works with vPos-compatible servers.

To set it up, you need to add an additional php query to your server, called

getbannerinfo.php

It must return a list of banner ad files and a tag for how many seconds each ad should be shown. It must be reachable by any web browser with the url (replace mytrackingserver.com with your own ;-) )

http://mytrackingserver.com/getbannerinfo.php

A simple example of what getbannerinfo.php should return in your web browser could look like this:

{banner}buynlarge.png{/banner}
{banner}silentwings.png{/banner}
{banner}youradhere.png{/banner}
{time}10.5{/time}

In this case, the viewer will show the banners in this order, in an ever-going loop. Each banner will be displayed for 10.5 seconds.

Several common image file formats are supported, including .jpg, .png and .gif. We recommend using .png files as these do not have any compression artifacts, and you can use the transparency function to make it blend with the background. You can also add some invisible border to the images if you want the banner to get some margin distance from the upper left screen edges.

The images must be placed so that they can be opened in any web browser, using the url

http://mytrackingserver.com/image.png. 

You may also for example define a path in the banner tag, like this:

{banner}banners/image.png{/banner}

where the url then becomes

http://mytrackingserver.com/banners/image.png. 

Hints:

• If you want a pause without any banner, create a banner which is empty. It could be a one-pixel transparent .png file, for example. Put this empty image in between where you want it displayed.
• The banners are displayed in the upper left corner. If they are wider than 2/3 of the screen width, they will be scaled down to fit within the 2/3 screen width.
• The banners are downloaded when a viewer starts up. So to re-load getbannerinfo.php, the viewer must be restarted.