Can I place my google ads in a custom island? What size do I need to create with google? Also, when I click on the custom island do I erase what is in the box and simply copy and paste the google script into it? When I did this it said "syntac error". What am I doing wrong? Was it wrong size ad? Thanks.

Place the adsense code between the "eof" lines.

Yes, I did that, but I'm wondering what size I should make the ads? I did the "small box" option from Google Adsense but it still came up with errors.

What kind of errors? Be sure you don't just "throw it in" it must be between the eof lines (There are two of them)

As seen below, I'm using 120x90 ads. The code should be placed as follows:



In control panel, the cache time should be 0 (zero) for this custom island.

Sweet, I've got it figured out now. I'm running some small square ads as well as a vertical ad along the left column. Thanks for the help!!

In this same vein, would you recommend running them as islands or putting them in each forum, etc.

Also, toying with the idea of having those who "donate" to the site's upkeep don't have to see the ads, so would the subcription option be a good way to do this....and with that, do I need to mod my forums to do a group check or whatever to know if the ad should be displayed or not.

Definitely keen to hear some options and suggestions around ad placement, straddling the fine line between pissing your user base off and getting decent revenue to support the site.

The subscription option only covers the ad island in forums.

Google allows up to 3 ad units, plus 2 link units; so you can come up with many options...

I have one side island, one footer island, one post island, then one link island at the top...

Hmm...guess I'm not clued in to the ad units vs link units part....guess I need to go read up.

Look at my forums for an example, link units are simply a plain link; ad units are a link and an ad.

happy b'day Carte Blanche!!

Gizmo, which of your sites are you referring to? I had a quick browse, but didn't register or log in, and I didn't see any ads.

And thanks Sirdude.

It's not a style that has ad's, it's the forum; and there are adsense ad's all over the forums on UGN (check my sig)

Ok, now, what's the sql command where I can set all the forum permissions view ad island to 1 for all my forums across all my groups. It's too much of a pain in the ass to try and do it individually for every forum for every group. There needs to be some select all options.

Also, how can I get the adsense stuff to adopt my wrappers so that it'll blend in regardless of what stylesheet my users are using.

Finally, because the ads are mostly going into boxes, are they picking up the context of the pages being displayed? Seems Google is phasing out the ads where you can select categories in August, but my new ads don't really seem to have any relevance to the the things on my pages.

Yep, I R n00B

Ok, maybe that wasn't finally. I see there's the bit where you can give adsense your authentication url....

let me step back, I created a new user, gave him the access that I wanted adsense to have so it could crawl hidden content to better target advertising.

So, I've told adsense this is the auth url..

http://www.theancientorder.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=login

What should I put as the restricted url? Also, for the parameters are we talking simple username and password as the names? Is it a POST method?

Bleh, It's 2:50 am here, I"m bleary eyed and tired so pardon my lack of clear thinking, I'm just too much a dabbler in all this instead of establishing any proficiency.

I'll answer what I can...

Adsense has a bot, it will troll your site; it should target ads according to content it finds.

As for blending options; the adsense ad's don't use CSS, they just drop the color codes in the ad's (actually, i think the latest rendition actually saves the ad colors on their servers) so theres not much to do in reguards to "matching".

Yah, I figured out the last bit. I think the way to address that might be to in essence create several ads and tweak the palette for the ads to the most common stylesheets in use on the site. Then again, I'm not sure I want to go through that much hassle either.

I figured that they had to be able to troll my site, but a lot of my content is "hidden" due login related levels.

So, while I gave the url to the login part, I just need to make sure that I'm giving them the right parameters for the dummy account I set up that should give them the requisite level of access to allow a proper content search.

Anyone got that handly sql statement I asked for?

Thanks for the assistance Giz.

I didn't know the bot could login... Do you have any documentation on this?

It's under the Site Authentication portion of the Adsense management area. Click first on the Adsense Setup tab, then look for the Site Authentication tab.

Giz, when you're putting the link one in, where exactly are you putting it? Under the Header html include on the general options or how?

From my own site, my header includes all seem to be above the breadcrumbs and menu lines for the forums, but I note that yours are just below.

Did you put that into your header.tpl file?

Hmm...must've...I think I've reproduced it, by including the ad code into the header.tpl file at the bottom. So, if you did it by some other means, I'd be curious, but otherwise I guess I've got it cranking fully now.

I'm surprised how quickly the money accumulates, and after years of surviving by donations, I'm almost giddy

Yup, I shoved that bad boy into header.tpl at the bottom ...

I wish it accumulated fast for me; we survive by donations, but the occasional "minimum" met does help with some costs...

We generally try to survive with the occasional web dev job (hey, people like me! lol)

Well, to be fair, I'm stoked that in the 6 days it's been running, I've made just under 30 dollars. If that holds up, it will cover a lot for me on an annual basis. And, I pretty much followed your formula of left side box, footer, post and link in the header.tpl, with a search box thrown in for good measure.

I still can't seem to get that login thing working, so I ended up making our tech advice forum which had been protected by access levels at least readable by the public so that it would help influence ad choice.

Lol, well, if you're ever in the market for a techie, keep me in mind hehe...