BarterBanner

Search traffic to small sites has fallen, and a niche blog rarely has a newsletter, an app or a brand to fall back on. BarterBanner is one answer to that gap: you show recommendation blocks from other participants, earn credits, and spend them getting your own pages shown elsewhere. No money changes hands inside the exchange. Credits are earned and spent at a rate based on the measured quality of each site, so a site sending real readers earns far more per impression than one sending bots. Every credit movement is listed in your statement, with the other site named. The plugin connects your WordPress site to the BarterBanner service at https://barterbanner.com. You need a free BarterBanner account; see "External services" below for exactly what is exchanged with it. What the plugin does

• Adds the widget script to your pages — once per page, however many blocks you place.
• Prints the domain verification meta tag, so you can activate your site without touching a template.
• Places blocks automatically inside posts, or manually via shortcode or a do_action( 'barterbanner_block' ) hook for page builders.
• Tells you on its settings page whether the block is actually being shown.

Formats

• Recommendation cards — 1, 3 or 5 per block
• Banners — 300x250, 728x90, 160x600, 320x50, responsive

1.7.0

• Pinning: a block can stick while scrolling, sit in a bar at the bottom of the screen, or in a column at the left or right edge (wide screens only). Set it on the settings page, or with pin="..." in the shortcode. A pinned block starts counting view time only after the reader has scrolled.
• Banner formats name their orientation (horizontal, vertical, rectangle).

1.6.1

• On/off settings are sanitized with WordPress's own wp_validate_boolean(), so "false" is read as off.

1.6.0

• Settings are removed from the database when the plugin is deleted.
• Settings page styles are loaded the WordPress way, only on that page.
• Request data and block output are sanitized and escaped throughout.
• Readme: an "External services" section describing exactly what is sent to BarterBanner, and when.

1.5.0

• The page count skips robots: crawlers and scripts that announce themselves, and requests without a user agent, no longer inflate it.
• Small sites report the count every 30 minutes as well as every 25 pages, so a quiet site's count is no longer lost at midnight.

1.4.0

• Automatic insertion now works under page builders. The check required the main loop, and builders such as Oxygen render post content outside it, so the block appeared on no page at all. A once-per-request guard replaces the loop requirement and serves the same purpose.

1.3.0

• Tells you on the settings page whether the block is actually being shown, and when it last appeared. No more hunting through page source.
• Page builders (Oxygen, Bricks, Elementor) are detected. They draw templates themselves and bypass automatic insertion, so the plugin says so instead of staying silent, and offers a shortcode and a do_action hook.

1.1.0

• Choose where the block appears: posts, pages, or both.
• Front page excluded by default, and any post or page can be excluded by id.
• The block now carries the language of the page, so cards come back in the language the reader is reading rather than the one their browser is set to.
• Optional count of pages served with a block. A reader with an ad blocker never loads the widget, so without this count every rate in the dashboard divides by an unknown number. Nothing about the reader is sent.

1.0.0

• First release: settings page, verification meta tag, shortcode and auto-insertion into posts.