Admin

From the admin page, you can perform a lot of high-level actions. For this reason, it is best if access to this section is restricted to experienced users only.

User Management

Use this interface to control who can access the OASIS interface and which parts of the interface the users are able to use.

Here you see a listing of all active users in the system. To add a new user, click "Add User". To edit an existing user, click on the user's login.

The user editing form is fairly simple to use. Login and password are required. The other fields are optional. Select the permissions that you want to grant to the user. Hit "Save" to save your changes.

If you grant a user "LimitedCampaigns" access, you can indicate which campaigns the user is allowed to access with the "Edit Limited Campaign Access" link:

Users who have LimitedCampaigns access will see the "Campaigns" link at the top of their interface, but when they click on it, they will only see the campaigns to which you have specifically granted access. Also, the interface will be somewhat limited (they will not be able to modify section assignments for campaigns and creatives).

Note that granting "Campaigns" access overrides "LimitedCampaigns" access.

If you change your own password, the next link you follow within the OASIS interface will require you to enter the new password.

If you hit "Delete" to delete a user, you'll be asked to confirm this action. Follow the onscreen instructions to delete the user.

Maximum Creative Sizes

With this interface, you can control the size of uploaded creatives. For each dimension of creatives your site will serve (for example, 468 x 60), you define the maximum size in bytes for creatives of that dimension. Any time somebody tries to upload a creative larger than this maximum, it will be rejected. There is no override, short of temporarily changing the maximum using this interface.

Here you see a list of all existing maximums. Click on "Add new" to set a new maximum. Click on the dimensions to redefine a maximum.

You cannot edit the width and height once you've defined a maximum. You can, however, delete a maximum and define a new one. To change the maximum, enter the new size, and hit "Save".

Traffic Shaping

For each hour of the day, enter a value indicating the approximate number of pageviews your site does during that hour. These numbers are not used in an absolute fashion; rather, they are used simply to compute the percentage of traffic at each hour of the day for optimal scheduling.

Hit "Save" to save your changes.

View Admin Log

This provides a convenient way to view today's administrative log, which contains a lot of valuable information about how OASIS is scheduling your campaigns and creatives.

Delivery Engine Internals

Hourly Assignments

With this page, you can look at exactly which creatives are assigned to which sections on your site. This is the Hourly Assignments shared memory segment that is loaded by the hourly maintenance script.

The left-hand column displays the section names (along with links to the Section management interface for each section). The right hand column shows, for each creative dimension, an array of the creatives assigned to the section.

Daily/Hourly Targets

This table combines data from two sources, the DailyTarget table and the Hourly Targets shared memory segment. For each creative which is being scheduled today, you'll see the Target, Weight, and Remaining counts.

On the right-hand side of the table, you see the corresponding entries in the Hourly Targets shared memory. Notice that if you reload this page, you may see changes in the right-hand side. This is a live look into the delivery engine's internals.

Creative Content

This table displays the Creative Content shared memory segment. For each creative active this hour, you see the creative's name, the content (using creative_preview.php to display the contents of locally-served creatives), whether the ad is a third-party redirection, the MIME type, and whether the creative is animated.

You can click on any of the banners to get the full-size version.

Creative Clickthrough

This table displays the Creative Clickthrough shared memory segment. For each creative active this hour, you see the creative's name, and the clickthrough URL for that creative.

Note that for display purposes, the clickthrough URLs have been broken up to wrap better, so don't try to copy and paste them. However, the URLs are hyperlinked with the unmodified URL, so you can get the URL that way if you need it.

Delivery Table

In a live server, the Delivery table may be too big for practical viewing. In general, you can get a lot of valuable information just from the stats. The stats link will tell you how big the Delivery table is (how many bytes it occupies in RAM), the number of rows, the number of unique IDs, and the number of IP addresses in the table.

If you opt to view the entire table, then you will see, for each user ID (or IP), the most recently viewed creative for each section/dimension combination. You will also see when the creative was viewed.

Reload Delivery Engine

This is an option that you will hopefully never have to use. It will force OASIS to recalculate all the section assignments and the hourly targets. Normally, if you add a new campaign (or change a campaign's status, impression goals, weights, etc.), the changes will show up in the Hourly Targets shared memory at the top of the next hour. If you absolutely can't wait until then, you can force OASIS to rebuild these shared memory segments immediately.

There are a couple of disadvantages to doing this. One is that the delivery of ads will pause while these shared memory segments are reloaded (usually not more than a second or two, though). To understand the second drawback, you have to understand how OASIS schedules campaigns. At the top of every hour, all campaigns with non-zero impression targets are given top priority until they meet their hourly targets. Then they stop delivering, and all campaigns with impression targets values of zero will run (in accordance to their relative weights). If you force a reload of the delivery engine, you will reset this process, and the non-zero campaigns will run again. They still will not exceed their daily targets, but if smooth delivery throughout the day is critical, you will not want to reload the delivery engine.

There is no confirmation required for this link -- if you click it, the delivery engine is immediately reloaded.