Advanced Ads and Auto Scaling / ELB

Hi eGantz,

thanks for reaching out.

I am unfortunately no server admin and don’t know about the options for auto-scaling environments. If you have a link, I would just be curious to learn what you are using.

Since I don’t know how scaling machines distribute the wp-content folder, I can not give a better answer than to assume that it will be the same problem with all plugins and not just Advanced Ads. We don’t use something fancy and if the assets folder is a problem, just don’t use the “ad blocker fix” option, which is the one creating this folder. The rest is handles by the WP media library.

Thomas

Hi Thomas!

Thanks a lot for the quick reply.

I totally understand, this is what I thought but I decided to give a try and open a new thread on this topic. hoping this will help others here.

Firstly, thank you for shedding some light on the ‘ad blocker fix’, I have cancelled it and the files are stopped being generated. so now all my servers are identical.

Though, I went and updated the settings and now I see that only one server has been updated. all settings are stored in the database only? or do you update files on the disk?

Is it possible to define settings via constants? couldn’t find anything on docs regarding this.

Best,
Eyal.

Oh, btw – this is my case:
I have outsourced all the resources WordPress needed to an external AWS services, replicated the application in several servers behind an ELB. so now I have multiple servers that serves the application and support scale seamlessly.

To make sure everything operates well, I need to prevent any filesystem updates, whether it’s a plugin or any entity that can update a file, that’ll cause the server to get out of sync and basically break the application.

Other plugins such as W3 Total Cache, Redis Object cache, let you to define all settings via constants and then you don’t need to deal with settings via the admin dashboard.

From my understanding – all ad management (ads, groups, placements) are made in front of the database and being stored there. so files aren’t being affected. though, I just went to update something and I see it caused some ads to break.

Any ideas?

Hi Eyal,

I definitely appreciate you opening this thread. Maybe this will attract other users with similar questions who could find help or even contribute to a solution.

The option to disable the ad block fix is stored in the database. When you disable this option and your database is identical on all machines, the asset files might not be deleted, but should not be used by the plugin either.

There are currently no additional constants for options.

Thomas

I would need more information on the ad problem you experienced after the update. It might even be unrelated to your setup.

You can let me know more details here (publically) or through https://wpadvancedads.com/support referring to this thread.

Thanks
Thomas

Hey Thomas!

Sure! Hope more people would join this discussion.
I’m sure it is more common that we think, people who would need this plugin basically aim for high scale.

So yes, disabling the ad block fix has solved the problem on one hand.

Though, after I went on settings, changed an option and pressed ‘Save’, I can’t see the ads.

When I going deeper and looking into the dev tools, I can identify that the same placement outputs an ad with a different ID. so everytime I refresh the page, there are 2 different IDs on the same ad. where is it being set? would love to know, maybe I can tackle down this issue sooner that I think.

Thanks!

Nevermind, I see that the plugin generates a random integer each time I refresh the page.

What does the ‘Remove Widget ID’ really do? cause I tried to toggle it and I don’t see any change in the front end.

Thanks!

The “Remove Widget ID” only removes the ID attribute of the Advanced Ads Widget. This is normally not needed and only helps ad blockers to identify the ad widget and remove it.

The placement ID is in fact random, but also needed for some placements, so removing it would not be good. I can not think about a reason why this might cause issues though.

Thomas