Developer Mode is a diagnostic toggle in the Advally XenForo plugin that forces every user — regardless of their assigned ad experience — into the Heavy (NASCAR) experience level and displays blue dashed placeholder boxes at every template position where an ad unit is registered.
Warning: Developer Mode disables ALL real advertising revenue on your site. Never enable it on a live production forum. Use it only in development or staging environments.
Enabling Developer Mode
In Admin → Options → Advally Advertising → Plugin Configuration, find the Development Mode toggle and enable it. A red warning banner appears to confirm the mode is active.
What It Shows
With Developer Mode on, every ad position in every template modification renders as a blue dashed placeholder box. The box includes the unit name and experience level, so you can confirm at a glance that:
- The template modification is firing at the correct location on the page
- The unit is visible at the current user’s experience level
- No ad position is duplicated or missing
When to Use It
- After installing the plugin for the first time — confirm all ad positions render before enabling real ads
- After upgrading — verify no template modifications were lost or broken by the XenForo update
- When troubleshooting a missing ad unit — Developer Mode shows whether the issue is at the template level (placeholder not visible) or the ad network level (placeholder visible but real ad not loading)
When you are done, disable Developer Mode and save. Ad serving resumes immediately with the next page load.