Revive Adserver is an open source project, dedicated to building and supporting the open source ad server software and the community of users around the world.

The Revive Adserver team announces the immediate availability of Revive Adserver v5.0.

Revive Adserver logoWe are pleased to announce the next major release of the Revive Adserver software, which has been given version number v5.0. This new version introduces a completely new Geotargeting plugin, enabling the software to work with the MaxMind’s new GeoIP2 datafiles. There is also a new feature to duplicate websites and their zones, and a number of bugs have been fixed.

Here are the most important changes included in Revive Adserver v5.0:

New features and enhancements

  • We implemented a new geotargeting plugin, which is compatible with the newer GeoIP2 datafile format being published by MaxMind nowadays. A particularly nice improvement is that the new plugin is capable of automatically downloading the datafiles from MaxMind’s servers, and also to update those files when MaxMind publishes a new version. We’ll post a separate blog shortly with some extra details and tips about the new Geotargeting plugin.
    Development of the new Geotargeting plugin has been made possible by a financial contribution from our partner Aqua Platform, specialists in high performance, high availability Revive Adserver hosting.
  • We extended the screens for managing user access to accounts, to display the most recent login date and time of users.
  • We added a feature to duplicate websites and their zones. We want to thank long time community member Heiko Weber for contributing this new feature.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed compatibility with PHP 7.4 and improved compatibility with other PHP versions
  • Fixed an issue with emails about campaigns about to expire due to end date not using the user’s preferred date format

Important: this v5.0 release has a number of Non-Backwards Compatible Changes:

  • The date and time that new user accounts are created / email address is updated has changed to UTC format in the database with this release. As timezone information was not stored with the previous values, these cannot be safely converted to UTC format. As a result, all user account creation / email address update values stored before upgrading to this release may not be accurate – but only by up to +/- 13 hours.
  • There are several changes between the legacy GeoIP and GeoIP2 databases and the upgrade process will try to migrate the rules in the best possible way:
    – “Regions” have been split into two levels of subdivisions and the ISO-3166 database has been updated. Depending on the country, the old delivery rule will be transformed in the appropriate subdivision level and geopolitical changes applied to the best of our knowledge
    – “Area code” is no longer returned. Any such delivery rule will be deleted.
    – The way the Geotargeting plugins work has been revamped. As such, third party geotargeting plugins or plugins depending on geotargeting information might need to be updated accordingly.

Full release notes for v5.0.0 can be found on our Github page.

Download, install and upgrade

Revive Adserver v5.0 is available for download now.

Once downloaded, please refer to the instructions for Installations of Revive Adserver or for Upgrading Revive Adserver. Make sure that the server(s) being used meet(s) the minimum technical requirements.

Community contributions

Several new developments in version 5.0 have been sponsored by community members, either financially or in the form of code contributions. We’re very grateful for the support we’ve received. If you would like to contribute to our project, please consider becoming a patron on Patreon.com.

Another way to contribute to our project, is by using the Revive Adserver Hosted edition.