Discourse Advertising

:discourse2: Summary Discourse Advertising allows the set up of advertisements on Discourse
:hammer_and_wrench: Repository Link https://github.com/discourse/discourse-adplugin
:open_book: Install Guide How to install plugins in Discourse

:information_source: NB: If you have discourse-adplugin enabled on your forum whilst you also have an adblocker running in your browser it can blank out the contents of your /admin/plugins page. Disabling your adblocker, using an incognito tab, or whitelisting your site should prevent this issue.

Features

:warning: IF YOU ARE RUNNING AN AD BLOCKER RIGHT NOW YOU WILL HAVE A VERY BAD TIME TRYING TO SET THIS UP! TURN IT OFF BEFORE PROCEEDING DOWN THIS PATH! You’ve been warned. :dragon:

Also be aware of browsers with built-in ad-blocker functionality (eg. Brave)

This is the officially supported Discourse ad plugin. Install and configure it to start serving ads on your Discourse forum.

The plugin supports the following ad platforms :

Configuration

Setting up House Ads

If you don’t want to use an external ad platform, but want to show your own ads, then House Ads are for you! Define your ads by going to the Admin section of your Discourse forum, and go to the Plugins section. On the left, you should see a link called “House Ads”.

Begin by creating your ads. Give each a short descriptive name and enter the html for each. Style them using a custom theme (Admin > Customize > Themes). Lastly, click the Settings button in the House Ads UI and choose which of your ads to show in each of the ad slots. The ads will start showing as soon as you add them to slots.

Configure Ads For Your Advertisement Platform

  • Navigate to the Admin section in your Discourse forum.
  • Click on Settings and a left vertical navigation bar should appear.
  • Choose your advertisement platform.
    • House Ads - if you want to create and serve ads from your Discourse instance.
    • Adsense - if using Adsense as your advertisement platform.
    • DFP - if using the DoubleClick for Publishers advertisement platform.
    • Carbon Ads - if using the Carbon Ads advertisement platform.
    • AdButler - if using the AdButler advertisement platform.
Input Your Details
  1. Add in your publisher ID - your publisher ID can be obtained from your ad platform and can also be found in your ad tag (see pictures below).
  2. Choose your trust level from the dropdown box. This will only display ads to users with a certain level of trust. For more details about trust levels go to the Plugin Features heading.
  3. Get the Advertisement Tag from your Ad Platform - see the images below to see what a tag looks like.
  4. Add parts of your ad code to Discourse’s site settings for the locations you wish your ad to appear. Refer to image for your ad platform to where parts of your ad tag should go. For more detail about where the ad will appear
  5. Choose Your Ad Size - this is the same size that you’ve put into your ad provider to create your ad. Go to the Plugin Features heading to see a list of supported Ad sizes.
Adsense Advertisement Tag to Discourse’s Site Settings

First, add the contents of your ads.txt file to your Discourse ads txt site setting. Then copy the following values to your Discourse settings:

DoubleClick for Publishers’ Advertisement Tag to Discourse’s Site Settings

Amazon Affiliates’ Advertisement Tag to Discourse’s Site Settings

Only for Product Link and Banner Ads.

Carbon Ads Script Tag to Discourse’s Site Settings

AdButler Ads Zone URL to Discourse’s Site Settings

:warning: This plugin only support AdButler “Standard Zones”. Text and VAST are not supported.

If you browse to a zone in the AdButler admin, then you can find the Publisher ID (PPPPPP) and the Zone ID (ZZZZZZ) in the URL of your browser’s address bar:

https://admin.adbutler.com/?ID=PPPPPP&p=textadzone.view&zoneID=ZZZZZZ

Configure the ads in Admin > Settings > AdButler. Enter the publisher id in the “adbutler publisher id” setting, and enter the Zone IDs in the different zone id settings as desired.

By default, ads are assumed to be size 728 x 90, or 320 x 50 in mobile view. To use different size ads, customize using CSS in your site’s theme. Override the following CSS:

.adbutler-ad { width: 728px; height: 90px; } .adbutler-mobile-ad { width: 320px; height: 50px; }

View Your Ad

Once you’ve configured your settings and your advertising platform has ads that are ready to serve, navigate to the page where you’ve inputted for the location and you should see ads.

Plugin Features

Available Locations for Ad Display

The following are available locations along with a description and an image showing their location within Discourse to display ads for all platforms.

Location Name Description
Topic List Top Ad will appear at the header of Discourse homepage
Topic Above Post Stream Ad will appear in the header of all Discourse forum topics
Topic Above Suggested Ad will appear in the footer above suggested topics of all Discourse forum topics
Post Bottom & Nth Post Ad will appear on the stipulated nth post within a topic. So if you have 5 posts in a topic and you want the ad to display after on the 2nd post, put 2 in ad_platform_nth_post_code .

Trust Levels

You can use the ad_platform_through_trust_level dropdown to disable ads for users above a certain trust levels. As a guide, choosing:

  • 0 shows ads to users that are not logged in.
  • 1 shows ads to users that are not logged in, and to new and basic users.
  • 2 shows ads to members as well, but not to regulars and leaders.
  • 3 shows ads to everyone, but not to leaders.
  • 4 shows ads to everyone including leaders.

To find more about trust levels in Discourse, refer to Discourse’s posts on trust levels

Personal messages

By default, ads won’t be shown in personal messages. To enable ads in personal messages, use the “no ads for personal messages” setting.

Groups

To give some users an ad-free experience, put the users in groups and add those groups to the “no ads for groups” setting.

Note that the Visibility in the group settings needs to be at least Group owners, members, moderators to ensure users who are part of the group can see that the group exists. If the Visibility of the group is more restrictive, the setting “no ads for groups” will be ignored and the ads will be visible to members of the group.

Categories

To disable ads in certain categories, add them to the “no ads for categories” setting. Also consider using the “no ads for restricted categories” to disable ads in all categories that have read access restrictions.

Tags

Individual topics can have ads disabled by using tags, and entering those tags in the “no ads for tags” setting. This is useful if some topics violate ad network policies.

Fixing Content Security Policy Issues

If your site uses an advertising service (like Google Ad Manager, Adsense, etc.) you probably will have to use a very permissive policy:

In the screenshot above, the policy allows any script from a https: source and any inline script. (In the future, this might be replaced by the strict-dynamic keyword, but as of this writing, strict-dynamic isn’t supported by Safari or Edge.)

:discourse2: Hosted by us? This plugin is available on our Standard, Business, and Enterprise plans. Advertising | Discourse - Civilized Discussion

74 Likes

Using this module for a while now and it is great fr adding ads around the site.

Talking to a couple of ad agencies and they want to use sticky header/footer banners, is there any way to add these without impacting UX on the site, EG by default the Google AdSense footer banner gets in the way of basic user experience by covering the reply buttons etc.

Any ideas?

1 Like

Is possible to implement AdSense ads after “n” topics in topic list (like house ads option)? @sam

edit: language, translation

1 Like

I’m not sure if I understand the written text correctly in this topic, as I don’t speak English and I use Google Translate. So I’d like to clarify:

  1. Can the plugin display personalized ads based on user preferences (for example, based on the topics the user has viewed on the forum or the text they typed in the forum’s search)?
  2. Can the forum administrator determine the placements of specific ads (for instance, set up displaying different advertisements in different threads or categories that match the ad’s theme)?
  3. If such features are not available in the plugin, is it possible to solve this task by integrating artificial intelligence?

Additionally: I want to show ads to the user in a personal chat with the chatbot (Discobot-ChatGPT), based on the context of their request to the artificial intelligence. Can I configure such advertising? If not, do you consider this idea viable, and could a solution to this task be expected in the plugin in the future?

How can I insert values from plugin settings. I am unable to get the values of the “post the ad after” and “adcontent” from the plugin settings.


this values are not useful.

I’d like to make a suggestion for a future update that I don’t even know is possible. It’d be great if we could add an eBay EPN script onto the forum so that we could make house ads for eBay links. I know on my main site, the eBay ads generate much more revenue and I could tailor them to the forum but I have nowhere to put the initial header script (or I don’t know how/where to do it which is VERY likely).

Just something to think about. Thanks!

Any workaround with that?

No, not on topics. That’s only available for House Ads.

You can use AdSense after N posts. There’s a site setting for that:

Shatabdi,

What plugin is that? It doesn’t look to be the discourse-adplugin that is discussed in this topic.

Yes, I am aware of that, thank you very much for your reply.

And couldn’t that space (N topics) also be implemented for AdSense ads or am I missing something?

Andres,

I haven’t found any sort of restriction from Google around that, though I’ll keep researching just to be safe. So other than the fact that we’d need to refactor the plugin some, I can’t think of any technical reason it couldn’t be implemented.

That said…there are no plans to do that at the moment. If we get more requests to add that feature, we’d be open to that. As well as PRs of course. :wink:

2 Likes

It sounds fine to me Mark, thanks!

1 Like

I have been using eBay’s EPN tools to create house ads. I made a component to place the main header code and then make house ads with various different search topics to be placed on the site. I’ve run in to two issues that I’m too stupid to figure out (I’m new to Discourse).

  1. The ads load on the initial page load but if you go into a topic there’s no ad unless you refresh the page. Maybe this is an EPN issue.

  2. The top banner ad is full width as it should be but for some reason the ads between nth post are coming in half width – even on mobile. Am I missing a setting somewhere? It’s the same exact code that’s producing full width on the top of the page.

Any assistance would be appreciated, even if it’s just to tell me I’m out of luck on this one.

Hello, did you get a solution to issue No. 1?

I haven’t received a solution for either issue although I saw on another topic that issue No.1 is probably related to the fact that going to another page on the forum doesn’t actually trigger a new page load so the ad doesn’t know it needs to be served again. I don’t know what the fix to that would even be.

As for the other issue, it’s more cosmetic than anything.

Hello, we seem to be working on similar goals here. I am curious about how your component fetches/stores listings? Are you using the eBay API?

Unrelated but I have a component that converts links posted in a topic to an EPN url. Maybe you’re interested in that?

I’m using the same code I use on my main site which is an official eBay tool. All I’ve done is create a bunch of house ads with different search criteria so that it served different ads on each page view.

Ultimately, I’d rather have my AdSense ads work properly so I didn’t need to do so many house ads – and get paid for impressions instead of solely clicks – but this is a decent way to monetize in the meantime.

Do you have the tool name? Or the code you’re using? I’d appreciate the tip. I might be able to solve your problems above too if I have a better idea of what the code is actually doing

Hey guys,
i tried to do the setup process for google adsense as shown in the tutorial.
I’ve set the ids and the ads.txt and edited the CSP values as well but for some Reason in the adsense Manager where i can enable/disable auto-Ads and that stuff it shows me that i am supposed to add a script snippet which shouldn’t be necessary with the adplugin.

If you need any other information or stuff like that feel free to ask me. I’m new to discourse so i don’t know that much about the support procedure and that :smiley:

The website is: https://www.bayerngamers.de

Greetings Bone2510

2 posts were split to a new topic: Group-Allowed ad settings not excluding groups