Hooray Simple Ads

Display ads made simple. You sold the ad — now just put it on your website. Hooray Simple Ads was built by a small publisher who wanted an easier way to manage direct-sold advertising in WordPress. Existing solutions offered far more complexity than the job required. The job itself is straightforward: create an advertiser creative, choose where it appears, rotate ads, schedule them, and track basic impressions and clicks — including on sites that already use aggressive page caching. That is all this plugin is for. It intentionally does less, because for many publishers less is exactly what they need. Place, rotate, schedule and track

• Create and manage ad creatives.
• Define reusable ad slots.
• Assign creatives and rotate them.
• Weight rotation when one advertiser should appear more often.
• Schedule campaigns so they start and stop on their own.
• Track first-party impressions and clicks.
• Responsive slots that reserve their space.
• Designed to work with cached WordPress pages.
• No SaaS account, no plugin-author telemetry, and no external ad-serving service.

Why it keeps working behind a cache Most ad plugins write the advertisement into the page HTML. A full-page cache then stores whichever ad the first visitor happened to get and serves it to everyone until the entry expires, so rotation stops without any visible error. This plugin does not put an ad into cacheable HTML. The page contains only an empty, correctly sized box, and the advertisement is chosen per pageview by a separate request served with no-store headers. Your cache hit ratio has no effect on rotation. There is nothing to configure for LiteSpeed, WP Rocket, Cloudflare or similar, and no ESI or fragment-caching setup is required. If a CDN in front of your site caches REST responses by default, exclude this plugin's endpoints; the Settings screen lists them. What it is not There is no bidding, no advertiser self-service, no billing and no targeting engine. There is no account to create and no service to subscribe to. Nothing is sent to any third-party server: it is your site, your database and your numbers. Placing an ad Use the Local Ad Slot block, the [hsads_ad slot="..."] shortcode (anywhere shortcodes work, including page builders and widgets), or hsads_ad( 'slot-slug' ) in a template. What counts as a view A view is counted at most once per ad, per placement, per page load, when at least half of the advertisement has been continuously on screen for one second in a tab the reader is actually looking at. Ads below the fold that are never reached are not counted, and neither are background tabs or quick scroll-pasts. Both thresholds are adjustable in Settings. The check runs in the reader's browser, so treat these as first-party publisher reporting rather than independently audited measurement. No third-party accreditation is claimed and none is implied. The aim is a number you can explain to an advertiser and get the same answer twice. Working alongside a programmatic network The plugin touches only the elements it created. It uses one namespaced global, scopes all of its CSS to its own class names, does not use the data-slot attribute, adds no MutationObserver and no z-index, and makes no third-party requests. It is intended to sit on the same page as a programmatic network without interfering with it. Privacy Hooray Simple Ads is designed to measure ad performance without building profiles of your readers. Reporting consists of aggregate counters by day, slot and ad. No cookies are set and no browser storage is used. Raw IP addresses, user agents, user IDs and device identifiers are not stored. There is no plugin-author telemetry, and no third-party ad-serving service is contacted. To stop the same view being counted twice, a short-lived scrambled deduplication record is kept and swept automatically, normally within a day. Suggested wording for your own privacy policy is added to Tools → Privacy. Clicking an ad sends the reader to the advertiser's own site, which is outside this plugin's control.

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. Go to Ads → Slots and create a slot: a place on your site where an ad can appear, with a size, for example a 728x90 leaderboard.
3. Go to Ads and choose Add New Ad. Upload the image, paste the advertiser's link, tick the slots it should run in, and set the dates.
4. Place the slot on your site with the Local Ad Slot block, or with the shortcode the Slots screen gives you.

Upgrading from an earlier version: your slots, ads and reporting history carry over unchanged, and so do your settings. Existing shortcodes and blocks keep working. If you call this plugin from a PHP template, see the changelog — the function was renamed. Purge your page cache after upgrading.

1.2.0

• The plugin is now published as Hooray Simple Ads. Your ads, slots, schedules, reporting history and settings are untouched.
• Renamed the plugin's internal identifiers — functions, constants, settings, admin pages, script handles, CSS classes and REST routes — onto a single distinctive prefix, so nothing this plugin registers can collide with another plugin on the same site.
• Existing [webpostad] shortcodes, ad slot blocks already in your posts, and REST calls from pages cached before the upgrade keep working. New placements use [hsads_ad] and hsads_ad().
• If you call this plugin from a PHP template, zra_ad(), zra_the_ad() and zra_plugin() have been renamed to hsads_ad(), hsads_the_ad() and hsads_plugin(), with no alias left behind. Change the call and it behaves exactly as before. Shortcodes and blocks are unaffected.
• The ?zra_debug=1 troubleshooting switch is now ?hsads_debug=1, and the plugin's admin screens are reached from the Ads menu rather than from any bookmarked address that contains the old prefix.
• Your settings are carried over automatically the first time the new version loads. Nothing to re-enter.
• For developers: the zra_click_params filter was renamed to hsads_click_params with no alias. The frontend's single global is now window.HooraySimpleAds.

1.1.2

• Added suggested wording for your own privacy policy under Tools -> Privacy, describing what the plugin records and what it does not.
• Fixed: a very large rotation offset in an ad request could select an invalid position, so no ad was returned and a PHP warning was logged.

1.1.1

• Security: view and click replay protection is now a unique database insert, so a token cannot be counted twice across separate requests on sites running a persistent object cache.

1.1.0

• Security: the click endpoint no longer accepts a redirect destination from the request. It reads the advertiser's URL from the database, which closes an open redirect on your own domain.
• Security: view and click counts now require a signed token issued when the ad was served.
• Security: deleting an ad or a slot now requires a POST and a nonce.
• Security: ad markup is built with DOM APIs, so text stored with an ad cannot become script.
• Fixed: every slot on a page chose the same position in the rotation, and a slot placed twice always showed the same ad.
• Fixed: schema upgrades could never apply, because of how the tables were declared.
• Fixed: view counting. Previously one visible pixel for 100ms counted, in any tab. Now half the ad, for a second, in a foreground tab.
• Fixed: a fixed pixel width made wide ads scroll the page sideways on phones.
• Fixed: an unfilled slot collapsed after layout and pushed the page around.
• Fixed: auto-refresh timers ran forever, including in background tabs.
• Fixed: dates and duplicate slot slugs are validated instead of failing quietly.
• Removed: the LiteSpeed ESI mode, which left ads blank when switched on.
• Removed: unconditional console logging on every page view.
• Added: the Local Ad Slot block, a Diagnostics screen, an opt-in debug mode, rotation shares, an uninstall routine, and a simpler Ads screen.

1.0.0 - 1.0.2

• Initial release, rate limiting on ad requests, and reporting fixes.