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Upgrading from 4.1.4 to 5.4


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Hi there, I am a long time user of Revive, going back to the days when it was phpAdsNew and through the OpenX period. we use Revive to manage and report on our email newsletter advertising. For the banners, we have them setup as custom banners and use direct selection to insert them into the email HTML. We use our own scheduling system to manage which adverts run on which editions of our email. Each email product and advertising spot is its own zone.

I am upgrading to the latest version as we plan to upgrade to MySQL 8 soon and require support for that. The upgrade process went pretty smoothly, except for the fact that the plugins were not enabled after the upgrade. I logged into the admin console and enabled them without issues. I tested a lot of the functionality post-upgrade including the direct selection of adverts and checking to see if impressions are being logged.

As part of the testing, I did click on a banner in an existing email. The URLs that are included in existing emails are the unsigned ck.php links and I they were not redirecting to the client. I thought there might be some fatal error happening but I checked the network request and can see the server is returning a 200 OK response and there is nothing in the error logs. Do you know why the server would be preventing click-throughs on the older unsigned ck.php file?

When I generated one of our emails with the new signed click-through links and test one of them, it didn't redirect either. When I view a banner in the admin interface, I am able to click through on the banner without issues.

An example of one of the click-through URLs that is not working is https://www.example.com/ads/www/delivery/ck.php?oaparams=2__bannerid=3554__zoneid=__cb=333fe0aba0__oadest=https://www.clientwebsite.com/

I used the recommended upgrade process of copying the database so I have swapped back to the older version for now. The new version is still on the server for me to test with.

Do you know why the existing ck.php links are not redirecting or how I can get more information regarding this?

What is the best path forward for us to upgrade to the latest version?

Do I need to change how we insert the banners into the email or can I continue to use direct selection?

I have noticed that there is support for Email/Newsletter zones in the product which is great. While on 5.4 I did trying changing one of the zones to that type and noticed that the existing associations between ads and the zone were dropped.

Does changing the type of zone have an impact on how the click-throughs are handled?

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I ended up downloading Revive onto my local development PC and have been able to troubleshoot this issue.

Both ck.php and cl.php get the destination via the function MAX_querystringGetDestinationUrl which performs the signature validation.

Our existing URLs don't have the timestamp or the signature in them as they are version 4 URLs. When it goes to validate the timestamp, this fails and false is returned.

For email newsletters where the click-through is embedded in the HTML, it breaks the click-through for all existing URLs.

Looking through the code, I can't see any way to bypass this for ck.php specifically or for legacy click-throughs.

The only solution I can think of is editing the ck.php file in the delivery folder (ignoring the message telling me not to do this) and removing the signature validation from MAX_querystringGetDestinationUrl() in that particular file. This will at least keep cl.php the same and make sure signatures are being validated for that file.

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