Another important, albeit smaller than the last. This update fixes a number of quirks and silly bugs including the false message that certain licenses are expired.
Geo Targeting Cookies have been replaced with actual sessions which caused another bug for the recently included duplicate advert feature, and that got fixed too.
Geo Targeting
For the past few years AdRotate Professional has supported Geo Targeting. To temporarily store the geo location of a visitor a cookies was used to keep that information around for a few days. For a bunch of websites this has been problematic at times and sometimes outright didn’t work – Or not reliably anyway.
Cookies have been a sensitive item over recent times. So as an experiment and potential upgrade, we’re going to try something new – Sessions.
Sessions are almost the same as cookies, except they stay on the server. This means a few new challenges for AdRotate Professional, but it’s not nearly as complicated as dealing with cookies.
Geo Data is stored in Sessions, this data is kept in there for up to 3 hours. During that time, no lookups are made to your geo targeting service of choice. Cookies had a longer lifespan, but generally expired within a day. So not much changes for you as a user.
Oooh an update… Should I update? You should update!
Updating AdRotate Professional is always a good idea. Updates are important for your websites security and to keep it performing at top speed. Still, after two years of trying to make that clear, people still do not update regularly.
AdRotate Professional now has a big banner and a few simple mechanics to tell you there is an update available. As a developer I get that updating every month or every other month can be a daunting task, you know, clicking 3 times and watching it update for maybe 5 seconds… But as a support provider I’m tired of telling people to update their plugin. And it got really tiresome because the issue they’re having often has been fixed months ago.
So, update people. It really solves many issues. Not all of them, but a lot.
Your license expires
Over the last couple of months everyone with an older license got their final Email notification that their license has now really really expired. This concerns everyone who has a license starting with 101. The interface on the account dashboards has been removed. The licenses are End Of Life. And you will no longer get updates if you still use one of those old licenses.
Licenses starting with 102, sold between 2015 and early 2019 are expiring as well. A whole lot of you already have received their expiry notification. So make sure your email address is up-to-date and keep an eye on your mailbox for a renewal offer.
Changes for AdRotate Professional 5.6.1
- [fix] More reliable duplicate advert filter
- [fix] Create an actual session if possible
- [fix] Error that your license is expired while it is not for some users
- [fix] AdRotate now better removes all database settings on uninstall
- [fix] Several PHP Warnings on new installs
- [new] Now using Sessions for Geo Targeting instead of cookies
- [change] Improved WordPress 5.3 compatibility
