Custom islands are a wonderful thing.

We use the extensively as containers for our advertisers display ads.

It would be great if Custom Islands Could:

• Be Set To Expire (hide?) on a Given Date (yet be available to renew)
  
• Be Set to Display Randomly Within a Given Set (all our advertisers want the "top" spot, so we manually rotate the ads.
  
• While I'm Wishing - If they could be set to expire, they would also send an email notification to the advertiser and/or admin that the ad was expiring (hey, might as well wish big)
  

While we love selling our advertisers space using the custom islands, it's a pain maintaining them.

Definitely something we want to expand on. A couple sites I've worked on currently use an ad management system like OpenX, which is free and works quite well. They setup their ads and then set the custom islands to display those certain ads using the OpenX system. That might be something that would work for you for now.

Maybe you should look into an ad manager, and just insert its code into the UBB and manage ad's from there? It'd do everything you want and more...

http://www.openx.org/

he beat me by a nanosecond because I was looking up the OpenX URL lol

Nanosecond? More like 9 seconds!

Thanks Rick & Gizmo.

We have a (custom built) database driven Ad Management system for our Classified ads on the main site.
I wasn't sure it could be integrated to work with the custom islands (not sure where to "hook" them in).

With so much work being done to improve the UBB, I was hesitant to have anyone mucking with the code under the hood :-)

Okay let me jump on top of my soapbox.

And have the ability to set forum specific and Global custom islands.
And place them anywhere you want without extra steps.(Header,Footer, Bla Bla)

I think that the overall way that CI's are being handled hasn't really changed in v8, so it should remain with a php and a html section for input.

Basically you'd just enter whatever code that your ad manager software provides into one of two input areas (if it's PHP code it'd go in the PHP area, or if it's say JavaScript you'd put it in the html area)

From there it's just a matter of your ad manager rotating the ad

Thanks Gizmo,

I'm not sure if this would handle the challenge we have...

~ The Placement of the ads needs to be rotated (position on the page).
~ Ads need a start and stop date. Once the ad expires, it should disappear, meaning there should be no custom box showing
~ Our ad management system is tied into a payment system. If an ad is renewed, the date range is automatically set to the new expiration

Well, an ad manager should be able to handle those... I'm not sure how many users would really be interested in CIs being handled that way that it'd end up a quick feature to add (or mod to have created)...