We are proud to release Revive Adserver v5.4.0

Revive Adserver v5.4.0 introduces improved password functionality for new and existing users, and provides compatibility with PHP 8.1.

We’ve implemented significant improvements to the way Revive Adserver handles end-user passwords:

• Bcrypt is now used to store password hashes, replacing md5.
• The password of the admin user is automatically re-hashed while performing the update to v5.4.0.
• All other users users will be sent an email upon login, asking them to enter a new password.
• The minimum password length is now set to 12 characters. This default length can be changed in the configuration file.
• We’ve added a welcome email for new users, to prompt them to set up their own password.
• We’ve added a password strength indicator during installation and password set up / recovery, based on MIT licensed Dropbox’s zxcvbn library.
• We’ve added autocomplete attributes for username and password fields, for example to help password managers more easily recognize user credentials and suggest strong passwords.

For more info about these changes, please refer to the page at https://www.revive-adserver.com/faq/passwords-in-v5-4-0/

There are also a number of other changes and improvements in this release:

• We’ve added support for PHP 8.1.
• We’ve added support for WEBP format in image and HTML5 banners.
• Website invocation code generation now uses async tags.
• Asynchronous tag now sends a custom “revive-<ID>-loaded” JS event when loading each banner and a “revive-<ID>-completed” event when all  the positions on the page have been filled. This allows interaction and customization, e.g. dynamically adding a class to all image banners.
• Tags are now generated using https by default, with the possibility to use plain http instead in the invocation code screens.
• We’ve added banner delivery setting to configure the “rel” HTML attribute for the click tracking links of image and text banners, defaulting to “noopener nofollow”. The setting is also exposed in the newly added “{rel}” magic macro.
• We’ve added a new maintenance screen to resend invitation emails to new users and password reset emails to users requiring the update to the new bcrypt password hash system.
• We’ve added missing linkUserToAdvertiserAccount, linkUserToTraffickerAccount and linkUserToManagerAccount methods to the v2 XML-RPC Api client library and fixed bugs related to (re)setting permissions through them.

This version also fixes a number of bugs and has one security improvement:

• We’ve fixed a prioritization issue when setting the “to_be_delivered” flag introduced in 5.3.0.
• We’ve fixed an issue parsing and modifying “var clickTag = ”;” in HTML5 banners when there is no whitespace around the equal sign.
• We’ve fixed an issue allowing the installation to proceed when entering two non matching admin passwords, as long as the “Repeat password” field was not empty.
• Password recovery e-mails were sent using the user name rather than the contact name in the To: header, this has been fixed.
• Password recovery landing screen is no longer English-only, instead it loads the user’s defined language instead.

The full release notes are available on the project’s Github pages.

Update April 20, 2022: we noticed that two bugs that we’ve fixed and that are included in this release, were accidentally left out of the release notes. These are:

• In the ‘Campaign Analysis Report’, part of the Advanced reports, the dropdown list of campaigns to select from was no longer presented in alpabetical order due to a small bug that was introduced in v5.3.x. With Revive Adserver v5.4.0, this bug has been fixed.
• In the MaxMind GeoIP2 plugin, a small bug existed in older version, that triggered a warning in PHP7, yet throws a fatal error in PHP 8. This bug has now been fixed and the updated version of the plugin ships with Revive Adserver v5.4.0.

Download, install and upgrade

Revive Adserver v5.4.0 is available for download now.

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

Community contributions

The continued development of Revive Adserver is being 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.