The preferences interface is fairly primitive. A full text box is provided for every preference, regardless of what types of values the software expects to find for these preferences. Be careful -- for fields that expect numbers, be sure you enter a number; for fields that expect "Y" or "N", be sure to enter one of these letters.
Following is a rundown of the preferences and their meanings.
AdminEmail
The e-mail address of the administrator. Used by daily_maint.php
to send campaign underdelivery warnings. Default: webmaster
.
ClickthroughWindow
The amount of time, in seconds, that entries can remain in the
Delivery table. If an entry is deleted between the time an ad
is shown to a user and the time he clicks on it, the clickthrough
will result in an error. You don't want this value too small for
that reason. However, you might not want it too big, either, as your
Delivery table's memory consumption will grow. Default: 7200
.
CurlPath
The path to curl
(used to retrieve remote URLs). PHP has some
built-in mechanisms for retrieving URLs, but they don't work with redirection,
which of course, is a common technique used in ad serving. If you install
curl
, enter the path to it here. If not, OASIS will use PHP's
built-in HTTP code, but be warned that it may not work.
Default: /usr/local/bin/curl
.
GzipPath
The path to gzip
(used to compress the archived log files).
Default: /bin/gzip
.
HtmldocPath
The path to htmldoc
, the program that converts HTML invoices
into PDF for batch printing. Default: /usr/bin/htmldoc
.
IdentifyPath
The full path to identify
, the ImageMagick tool used
to determine image dimensions, type, animation, etc. Default:
/usr/X11R6/bin/identify
.
InsertActive
Should campaigns added with the New Campaign interface be active?
If this is set to "Y", they will be active, and no e-mail will be
sent. If it is set to "N", campaigns will be added with a status
of "Inactive", and e-mail will be sent to NewCampaignEmail to have
an administrator make the campaign live.
Default: N
.
InvCycle
What kind of cycle does the daily traffic on your site follow? Your
choices are "Day", "Week", "Month", and "Year". Note that your
site's traffic may follow a daily cycle in its hourly traffic,
but it may have a weekly cycle in its daily traffic. We're only
interested in how the daily numbers vary.
If you set this to "Week", your predicted Monday traffic will be calculated based on historical data from Mondays. Tuesday traffic will be based on Tuesdays, and so on. If you set this to "Month", the 1st of the month will be calculated based on past 1sts. The same idea applies to "Year". If you set it to "Day", all days are treated the same.
Note that if you set this to "Week", it will take 7 days for you to have
enough data to project future inventory. If you set it to "Month", it
will take 30 days to project future inventory, and if you set it to "Year" --
you guessed it -- it will take 365 days to project future inventory.
Default: Week
.
InvDaysBack
How many days back should OASIS go to project future inventory?
Default: 90
.
InvDaysForward
How many days out should OASIS project future inventory?
Default: 60
.
InvMethod
What method should be used to project traffic? Currently, you can only
set this to "Average".
Default: Average
.
InvoiceFooterString
The string (may be a long block of text) which will appear at the bottom
of every invoice. No default.
Invoice Due
Number of days after which invoices must be paid. This is added to the
InvoiceDate. Default: 30
.
InvoiceHeaderGraphic
The name of the graphic file to be inserted at the top of every invoice.
This file must reside in the mgmt
directory in order for
htmldoc
to build PDF files for batch printing. If you don't
care about this feature, you could conceivably use a URL instead of a
local file name. No default.
InvoiceHeaderString
The short text label at the top of every invoice. Default: Internet Advertising Invoice
.
InvScaleFactor
The delivery simulation used to predict inventory availability is very
time-consuming. To speed it up, you can use this scale factor to simulate
a fraction of the traffic. For example, if the traffic projection says
you have 10,000 available impressions, and you have two campaigns each
scheduled for 5,000 impressions, rather than simulating all 10,000 impressions,
you could simulate 1,000 impressions with two campaigns of 500 impressions
each.
The smaller you set this value, the faster your simulation will run, but
the less accurate it will be.
Default: 0.5
.
InvWarningThreshold
As the delivery simulation runs, it looks for section/day combinations
where the allocated impressions seem high. This value determines what is
considered "high". It represents a percentage of allocated impressions.
For any day in the simulation, if any section's allocated impressions
exceeds this value, a warning will be e-mailed to the administrator.
Default: 80
.
KeepLogsFor
For how many days should we keep OASIS delivery logs? These files are quite
large, and they're really not important unless you're trying to diagnose
a problem with the server.
Default: 14
KeepStatsFor
For how many days should we keep OASIS stats? You want to keep these
around for a pretty long time so that you can run reports, but you want
to keep an eye on the size of the HourlyStats table. It gets pretty big.
Default: 800
LogDir
The directory in which log files are written by the delivery engine.
This should be on as fast a disk as possible, but one with a decent
amount of storage, as log files are archived under this directory.
Default: /usr/local/oasis/logs
.
NewCampaignEmail
The e-mail address to which the system sends notifications of campaigns
being added via the "New Campaign" interface (presumably, this interface
is used by non-techies -- you may wish to know whenever they enter
campaigns so that you can verify them before they go live). Default:
webmaster
.
OASISRoot
The URL to the OASIS directory. Used to construct sample tags in
the section management interface, and used to e-mail the URL to the
address specified in NewCampaignEmail. No default.
ReportFromAddr
RevenueReportClicks
ShmSizeCreativeContent
ShmSizeCreativeClickthroughs
ShmSizeHourlyAssignments
ShmSizeHourlyTargets
ValidateClickthrough
ValidateThirdParty
Note: the Campaign Insertion interface requires that third party creatives
be retrieved so that their dimensions can be obtained. This preference
setting has no effect on the Campaign Insertion interface.
Default:
The e-mail address to be used when sending weekly reports to advertisers.
It may include a "friendly form". For example: "WRAL OnLine New Media
Should clicks and CPCs be included on the revenue report? If you don't
sell campaigns based on CPC, then these columns will be superfluous on
the revenue reports. Set this to "N" to suppress the columns, and to
"Y" to display them. Default:
Y
.
Size (in bytes) of the shared memory segment containing the creative
content for the server.
See the shared memory section
for information on how to tune this value.
Default: 5,000,000
.
Size (in bytes) of the shared memory segment containing the creative
clickthroughs for the server.
See the shared memory section
for information on how to tune this value.
Default: 500,000
.
Size (in bytes) of the shared memory segment containing the hourly
creative assignments for each section.
See the shared memory section
for information on how to tune this value.
Default: 5,000,000
.
Size (in bytes) of the shared memory segment containing the hourly targets
for each creative.
See the shared memory section
for information on how to tune this value.
Default: 50,000
.
Should clickthrough URLs be validated when inserting creatives?
If set to "N" (not recommended, but you may have situations where
the URLs simply cannot be retrieved by PHP), the system will not check the
clickthrough URLs. Default:
Y
.
Should third party creative URLs be validated when inserting creatives?
If set to "N" (not recommended, but you may have situations where
the URLs simply cannot be retrieved by PHP), the system will not check the
URLs.
Y
.