We’re proud to release version 5.5 of the Revive Adserver software.

This version introduces support for the VAST2 standard for video ads, an extension of the support for video ads that has been part of Revive Adserver for many years.

This was made possible by a generous donation from Aqua Platform, the company specializing in enterprise grade hosting of the Revive Adserver software. Aqua Platform donated the VidiX plugin, their commercially available product, to be included as a standard, free component of Revive Adserver. Many thanks to Aqua Platform for their continued support of our project.

Version 5.5 also contains a number of bug fixes and a small security improvement. Please continue reading these releases notes for the full details.

• We bundled the VAST2 Enhanced Video Ads plugin, enabling support for this IAB video ads protocol.
  This unlocks the ability to create video ads that – in turn – consist of VAST2 tags from third-party applications, and it also enables the user to generate VAST2 tags that can be used in any VAST2 compliant video player or in any VAST2 third-party ad serving system.

We added experimental command line install / update scripts, enabling system administrators to install or update the software from the command line. This functionality is for experienced sysadmins only and should – for the time being – only be used on test and staging environments. Documentation on how to use these scripts is forthcoming.

This version of Revive Adserver fixes a number of bugs:

• We fixed an issue preventing plugin hook “addUrlParams” from being called when generating click URLs since the introduction of the signed clicks functionality.
• We fixed an issue preventing click-based conversion tracking from properly working.
• We fixed an issue preventing password recovery from working properly when using a Postgres database.
• We added a missing check for the tokenizer PHP extension during install and upgrade.
• We fixed the zone delete action being always displayed regardless of the actual permissions.
• We fixed the “Export Statistics to Excel” functionality so that the link is only disabled when the selected range has no statistics at all.
• We fixed usage of specific charset with SPC (single page call) on local invocation.
• We fixed an uncommon issue preventing maintenance from properly completing in edge cases.

This version of Revive Adserver has a non-backward compatible change:

• We removed support for creating new inline video ads using FLV type and/or streaming format.  Backwards compatibility for delivery is retained, meaning that banners that were created with older version and that still exist in the database will continue to work.

This version of Revive Adserver contains a fix for a very low risk security issue that was reported to us through our HackerOne program. We’ve posted a security advisory on this issue.

We would like to thank the following community members for their contribution to this release:

• @kavit-gangar – #1428
• @archiewestermann – #1420
• @spantaleev – #1399
• @pmacko – #1426
• @camlafit – #1403

If you’d like to take advantage of all the features and benefits of the Revive Adserver software, without having to take care of the installation on your own server, software updates, and performance tuning, we’d like to suggest having a look at Revive Adserver Hosted edition. For a modest monthly fee, we’ll take care of all the technical work, all you have to do is log in and get started.