Official Discourse Advertising Plugin

This is the official Discourse advertising plugin. It allows advertisements to be served by supported advertising platforms for users with a Discourse forum.

Supported Discourse Version: 1.4

Supported Ad Platforms:

• Google Adsense
• Google Double Click for Publishers

Quick Start in 3 Steps

This quick start shows you how to install this plugin and use it. Recommended if you have:

• A live discourse forum
• You have deployed that forum using Docker. Most people using Digital Ocean will have deployed Discourse using Docker.

For installation for non-docker or local development (those with programming experience), see Other Installation.

Step 1 - Install the Official Discourse Advertising Plugin

As seen in a how-to on meta.discourse.org, simply add the plugin's repository url to your container's app.yml file:

hooks:
  after_code:
    - exec:
        cd: $home/plugins
        cmd:
          - mkdir -p plugins
          - git clone https://github.com/team-melbourne-rgsoc2015/discourse-adplugin.git

Rebuild the container

cd /var/docker
git pull
./launcher rebuild app

Step 2 - Configure Your Settings to Display Your Advertisments

There are 2 easy steps for configuring your Discourse settings to enable advertisements to display in your Discourse forum.

Step 2(a) - Choose Your Advertisement Platform

• Navigate to the Admin section in your Discourse forum.
• Click on Settings and a left vertical navigation bar should appear.
• Choose your advertisement platform by clicking on "Adsense Plugin" if using Adsense as your advertisement platform and/or click "DFP Plugin" if using the DoubleClick for Publishers advertisement platform.

Step 2(b) - Input Your Details

Depending on which ad platform you are using, to input your ad details you need to:

1. Add in your publisher ID - your publisher ID can be obtained from your ad provider and can also be found in your ad tag (see picture below).
2. Choose your trust level from the dropdown box. This will only display ads to users with a certain level of trust. For more details about trust levels go to the Plugin Features heading.
3. Get the Advertisement Tag from your Ad Provider - see the images below to see what a tag looks like.
4. Add parts of your ad code to Discourse's site settings as per the color coding in the images below. Only use the image for your ad platform.
5. Choose Your Ad Size - this is the same size that you've put into your ad provider to create your ad. Go to the Plugin Features heading to see a list of supported Ad sizes.

Adsense Ad Tag Into SiteSettings

DoubleClick for Publishers' Ad Tag Into SiteSettings

In Ad Plugin Features:

• Available Locations for Ad Display
• Ad Sizes Supported
• Trust Levels
• Other.... (TBC)

Locations to be in a table...

Post Bottom Topic Above Post Topic Above Suggested Topic List Top

// TO BE FIXED START Add GIFS, Images ✘ this is a cross ✓ this is a tick After installation users likely want to:

• Choose platform - DONE
• Input ad codes + do a few other things. - DFP in detail with custom targeting - write guide on this.
• Display ad.

Input 3 parts - ad code (topmost box), width, height. And be sure to untick the disable box. Then, refresh the page for the inputs to take effect, and go to the ad location.

Usually google sizes tDOcso input are (widthheight) 300250 or 728*90 (best) respectively. Input your dfp ad code.

The namings in settings are with reference to the plugin outlets created by Discourse.

dfp_topic_list_top_code: ad will appear at the header of Discourse homepage

dfp_topic_above_post_stream_code: ad will appear at the header of all Discourse forum topics

dfp_topic_above_suggested_code: ad will appear at the footer above suggested topics of all Discourse forum topics

dfp_post_bottom_code: ad will appear on the Nth post (be sure to input N in the bottom-most box called

dfp_nth_post_code and ensure your total number of posts in topic >=N. For example, if you input N = 4, the forum should have at least 4 replies/posts) // TO BE FIXED END

• Finally, if you wish to disable the ad, tick ad disabling box

Step 3 - See Your Ad

Once you've configured your settings and your advertising platform has ads that are ready to serve, navigate to the page where you've inputted for the location and you should see ads. For example, a Discourse forum serving ads looks like this:

INSERT_IMAGE_HERE

Other Installation

There are two sets of installation instructions:

1. Non-Docker Installation - If you have experience with programming. This will set up this plugin as a git submodule in your Discourse directory.
2. Local Development - If you want develop locally and have experience with programming. This will set up this plugin as a symlinked file in Discourse's plugin directory.

If you already have a live Discourse forum up, please go to the Quick Start heading above.

1. Non-docker installation

• Run bundle exec rake plugin:install repo=http://github.com/team-melbourne-rgsoc2015/discourse-adplugin in your discourse directory
• In development mode, run bundle exec rake assets:clean
• In production, recompile your assets: bundle exec rake assets:precompile
• Restart Discourse

2. Local Development Installation

• Clone the Discourse Adplugin Repo in a new local folder.
• Separately clone Discourse Forum in another local folder.
• In your terminal, go into Discourse folder navigate into the plugins folder. Example cd ~/code/discourse/plugins
• Create a symlink in this folder by typing the following into your terminal :

ln -s ~/whereever_your_cloned_ad_plugin_path_is .
For example: ln -s ~/discourse-plugin-test .

• You can now make changes in your locally held Discourse Adplugin folder and see the effect of your changes when your run rails s in your locally held Discourse Forum files.

Advertisement Sizes Supported

This plugin supports the following ad sizes for the following locations.

All locations except post bottom	Post bottom location	Mobile
728 x 90	728 x 90	320 x 50
336 x 280	336 x 280
300 x 250	300 x 250
970 x 90	970 x 90
468 x 60	468 x 60
234 x 60	234 x 60
125 x 125
180 x 150
200 x 200
250 x 250

Questions or Want to Contribute?

Open an Issue on this repository to start a chat.

Issues and Pull Requests are greatly appreciated. Bear in mind that when submitting feature requests, if it's not something that most people will use, it probably won't get merged.

Credits

Discourse.org - Thanks to our mentor @eviltrout and the Discourse team - @LIST_OUT_THEIR_GITHUB_HANDLE Rails Girls - Thanks @sareg0 and the Rails Girls Team. Our Coaches - @LIST_OUT_THEIR_GITHUB_HANDLE

License

TBC: GPL v2 or MIT