Advally — WebOps & Advertising 4.0.3

Why upgrade

4.0.3 makes your ad settings actually take effect. Several options on the Advally settings page saved correctly and then did nothing — most visibly every side-adhesion setting, which has never worked on any forum.

If you have ever set a side ad, changed an "appear margin", or turned on the double bottom unit and seen no difference on your site, this is why. It was not your configuration.

Low risk: no settings change, no database migration, nothing to reconfigure. Your existing values start working as soon as you upgrade.

What changed

• Side adhesion now works. The add-on was sending its side-adhesion settings under a name the ad system does not read, so the whole block was discarded. Enable it, choose which side, set the minimum screen width — all of it now reaches your pages.

• "Appear margin" now works, top and bottom. How far a reader scrolls before an adhesion appears was ignored on both bars and is now honoured.

• The double bottom unit now works. The side-by-side bottom adhesion option was being dropped and now applies.

• One setting was removed rather than left lying. The top adhesion had a "hide at end of page" box that nothing has ever implemented. Leaving a control that does nothing is worse than removing it, so the setting is gone. End-of-page hiding still works on the bottom adhesion, where it is implemented.

• Security: malvertising protection no longer fails open. When the under-attack baseline could not be established, protection defaulted to report-only instead of blocking. It now fails closed.

What the upgrade does to your database

Nothing. No tables are added, changed or removed.

Upgrade

1. Download the 4.0.3 ZIP.
2. XenForo Admin CP → Add-ons → Install/upgrade from archive.
3. Select the ZIP and confirm.

Your existing settings carry forward; no reconfiguration is needed. Settings you had already saved for side adhesion and appear margins begin applying immediately.

Rollback

Reinstall the previous version's ZIP the same way (Install/upgrade from archive). Settings are preserved. Rolling back returns the affected settings to being ignored.

Compatibility

• XenForo 2.2+ / 2.3+
• PHP 8.0+
• An active Advally publisher account (connect from the Ads page)

Advally — WebOps & Advertising 4.0.3

Why upgrade

4.0.3 makes your ad settings actually take effect. Several options on the Advally settings
page saved correctly and then did nothing — most visibly every side-adhesion setting, which
has never worked on any forum.

If you have ever set a side ad, changed an "appear margin", or turned on the double bottom
unit and seen no difference on your site, this is why. It was not your configuration.

Low risk: no settings change, no database migration, nothing to reconfigure. Your existing
values start working as soon as you upgrade.

What changed

Side adhesion now works. The add-on was sending its side-adhesion settings under a name
the ad system does not read, so the whole block was discarded. Enable it, choose which side,
set the minimum screen width — all of it now reaches your pages.

"Appear margin" now works, top and bottom. How far a reader scrolls before an adhesion
appears was ignored on both bars and is now honoured.

The double bottom unit now works. The side-by-side bottom adhesion option was being
dropped and now applies.

One setting was removed rather than left lying. The top adhesion had a "hide at end of
page" box that nothing has ever implemented. Leaving a control that does nothing is worse
than removing it, so the setting is gone. End-of-page hiding still works on the bottom
adhesion, where it is implemented.

Security: malvertising protection no longer fails open. When the under-attack baseline
could not be established, protection defaulted to report-only instead of blocking. It now
fails closed.

What the upgrade does to your database

Nothing. No tables are added, changed or removed.

Upgrade

1. Download the 4.0.3 ZIP.
2. XenForo Admin CP → Add-ons → Install/upgrade from archive.
3. Select the ZIP and confirm.

Your existing settings carry forward; no reconfiguration is needed. Settings you had already
saved for side adhesion and appear margins begin applying immediately.

Rollback

Reinstall the previous version's ZIP the same way (Install/upgrade from archive). Settings
are preserved. Rolling back returns the affected settings to being ignored.

Compatibility

• XenForo 2.2+ / 2.3+
• PHP 8.0+
• An active Advally publisher account (connect from the Ads page)

Advally — WebOps & Advertising 4.0.2

Why upgrade

4.0.2 fixes the automatic setup that runs when you connect your forum to Advally. On some
boards that automatic setup could not finish on its own, and this release makes it work
everywhere. If your forum connected without any trouble, this release changes nothing you
can see — you can upgrade at your convenience.

When you connect a forum, Advally creates a dedicated service account and a limited API key
so it can manage the add-on for you. Creating that account went through the same checks as a
normal member signup — so on a board that requires an email address, enforces a shorter
username limit, or marks a profile field like date of birth required at registration, the
service account could not be created and the connection did not fully complete on its own.

Low risk: no settings change, no database migration, nothing to reconfigure.

What changed

• Connecting your forum now completes on its own on every board. The service account is

created as an internal system account rather than being run through the member-signup
rules, so a required-email, short-username or required-profile-field setting on your board
no longer blocks it. If you had connected but the service account never appeared, upgrading
and letting the daily sync run (or reconnecting from the Ads page) now creates it.

• The service account still holds exactly the four Advally permissions and nothing more.

It is a no-login account that only the managed API key acts as — this release does not
widen what Advally can do, it only lets the account be created where it previously couldn't.

This also includes the 4.0.1 security fix, so upgrading straight from 4.0.0 to 4.0.2 is
fine. Nothing else changed.

Upgrade

1. Download the 4.0.2 ZIP.
2. XenForo Admin CP → Add-ons → Install/upgrade from archive.
3. Select the ZIP and confirm.

Your existing settings carry forward; no reconfiguration is needed.

Rollback

Reinstall the previous version's ZIP the same way (Install/upgrade from archive). Settings
are preserved.

Compatibility

• XenForo 2.2+ / 2.3+
• PHP 8.0+
• An active Advally publisher account (connect from the Ads page)

Advally — WebOps & Advertising 4.0.1

Why upgrade

4.0.1 is a security patch on top of 4.0.0. It matters to you only if your forum already
has a user account named Advally Service that you created yourself — for example
during an older manual setup, or because someone registered that name on your board.

In 4.0.0, connecting your forum to Advally creates a dedicated service account and an API
key bound to it, so Advally can manage the add-on for you. If an account with that name
already existed, 4.0.0 reused it instead of creating its own — including when that account
was an administrator or moderator. The key itself was always limited to four Advally
permissions, but it acted as that account, so on those boards it inherited more authority
than intended.

No board was compromised by this and no credential was exposed. Nothing outside your forum
could trigger it. But the add-on promised a least-privilege service account and, on those
boards, did not deliver one — so this is worth taking.

Low risk: no settings change, no database migration, nothing to reconfigure.

What changed

• The service account is now vetted before it is reused. If an existing account named

"Advally Service" is an administrator, moderator or staff member, Advally now refuses to
bind its managed key to it. Connecting still succeeds and nothing breaks — the add-on
logs the reason and retries daily, so you can rename or demote that account (or remove
it) and the correct dedicated account is created on the next attempt.

• An ordinary existing account by that name is still reused, deliberately. Refusing

outright would break the Connect flow for boards that are set up correctly, and that
trade is not worth it.

• Reconnecting no longer relies on the account name. If the API key is deleted in the

Admin CP and Advally has to mint a new one, it now looks the service account up by the
ID it recorded when it created it, rather than by a name anyone can change or claim.

Nothing else in 4.0.0 changed. If your forum has no account named "Advally Service", this
release is a no-op for you and you can upgrade at your convenience.

Upgrade

1. Download the 4.0.1 ZIP.
2. XenForo Admin CP → Add-ons → Install/upgrade from archive.
3. Select the ZIP and confirm.

Your existing settings carry forward; no reconfiguration is needed.

Rollback

Reinstall the previous version's ZIP the same way (Install/upgrade from archive). Settings
are preserved.

Compatibility

• XenForo 2.2+ / 2.3+
• PHP 8.0+
• An active Advally publisher account (connect from the Ads page)

Advally 4.0.0 — WebOps arrives: find and fix what search engines and AI assistants hold against your forum.

This is the biggest release the add-on has had. Everything the advertising side already did is unchanged, and alongside it there is now a second half called WebOps: a page in your Admin CP that checks your forum's crawl hygiene, metadata, images and distribution, scores it out of 100, and offers a one-click fix for most of what it finds. Checks re-run every hour, or on demand with the Run checks now button.

Your images can finally be seen. Out of the box XenForo blocks guests from viewing attachments, which means Googlebot cannot see your images either — so your forum is effectively invisible to Google Images and Discover, and every thread shares with the same site logo instead of its own picture. WebOps detects this and fixes it in two confirmed steps, preserving any per-forum permission overrides you have already set.

Deleted threads now return the right answer. When a thread is permanently deleted its URL responds with HTTP 410 Gone rather than a soft error, so search engines drop it quickly instead of re-crawling it for months. Those records are cleaned up automatically after two years.

See where you stand with AI assistants. A grid shows which of them — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and others — your robots.txt currently lets in, and the plugin tracks the visits those assistants actually send you, counted as sessions and aggregated once a day. Search Console and Analytics figures arrive as a summary from Advally and render as simple charts; the plugin never talks to Google directly and adds no JavaScript to your pages.

Email notifications, off by default. Turn them on for a note when your score changes — at most once a day — and a weekly digest, to up to twenty addresses.

Connecting your forum is now a single step. After you click Connect to Advally the add-on sets up its own management access automatically, scoped to just what Advally needs. That used to be a manual job in your Admin CP.

Upgrading

This release also fixes the reason several earlier versions never reached you: a fault in our build pipeline meant versions 2.7.3 through 3.3.0 were built but never published, so the newest version available to download was 2.7.2 from July.

Upgrading from any 2.x or 3.x version straight to 4.0.0 is supported and tested — the database steps run in the right order in a single hop.

1. Download the 4.0.0 ZIP.
2. XenForo Admin CP → Add-ons → Install/upgrade from archive.
3. Select the ZIP and confirm.

Please take a database backup first, as with any add-on upgrade. Your existing settings carry forward and nothing needs reconfiguring.

To roll back, reinstall the previous version's ZIP the same way; settings are preserved and the WebOps tables are left in place, harmless on an older version.

Requires XenForo 2.3 or newer and PHP 8.1 or newer (tested on 8.3).

Advally Advertising v2.7.2 - Faster search discovery, and a dashboard that stays in step.

Optional: tell search engines the moment you post (IndexNow). There is a new "Enable IndexNow Submission" switch on the Advally options page. When you turn it on, the plugin notifies Bing - and other search engines that support IndexNow - the instant a thread is posted or edited, instead of waiting for a crawler to come find it. Because AI assistants like ChatGPT and Copilot draw on Bing's index, fresher indexing there can mean your content is cited sooner. It is off by default and enabled per forum, so nothing changes until you opt in. When you do, the plugin handles the setup for you - there is nothing to paste or configure - and submissions are batched quietly in the background so there is no impact on posting. Nothing about your members or their data is sent; only the public URL of the thread that changed.

Ad-unit changes on your forum now report back to your dashboard. Until now, syncing ran one way: settings from your Advally dashboard flowed down to the forum. If you adjusted an ad unit directly in your forum's Admin CP, your dashboard did not necessarily reflect it. Now those local changes report back up automatically, so your Advally dashboard stays an accurate picture of what is actually running on the forum. This makes support conversations quicker and keeps the two sides from drifting apart. It happens on its own; there is nothing new for you to do.

Upgrade: Download the ZIP from https://advally.com/plugin/xenforo/release, then in your Admin CP go to Add-ons and choose Install/upgrade from archive, select the ZIP and confirm. All existing settings carry forward; no configuration changes required.

Rollback: Download the v2.7.1 ZIP from the same release page and install it the same way. XenForo handles the downgrade and your settings are preserved. If you had turned on IndexNow, rolling back simply stops the notifications.

Compatibility: XenForo 2.3 or newer, PHP 7.4 or newer. No plan requirements - all features work on every connected forum.

Why upgrade: The "update available" notice introduced in v2.7.0 is now reliable even when your forum cannot reach Advally at the moment you open the options page.
What changed: If the update check cannot complete, the notice no longer claims you are on the latest version. It now shows "Could not check for updates right now" and checks again on the next page load, so "running the latest" only appears once it has actually been confirmed.
Upgrade: Download the archive, then in your XenForo Admin control panel go to Add-ons, choose Install/upgrade from archive, select the file, and confirm. Your existing settings carry forward with no changes needed.
Rollback: Reinstall the previous archive from the same Add-ons screen if you need to revert.
Compatibility: XenForo 2.3, PHP 7.4 or newer. No plan or configuration changes required.

v2.7.0 — ExperienceResolver extraction with most-permissive multi-group resolution (unmapped logged-in groups now resolve to the heaviest experience — disclosed behavior change); Dev Mode no longer forces heaviest experience; XF-native per-unit and per-column tooltips on the Ad Units matrix; new "Advally — Advanced" ACP group with OAuth/API-token internals and advallysiteid hidden from day-to-day settings; includes all 2.6.x fixes underneath (settings publish, pair cache-bust kills stale-token orphans). Upgrade via XF Admin CP archive upload only. Rollback path: 2.6.29.

Why upgrade: This release lets your forum's Advally plugin report its current settings to Advally automatically, so the configuration shown in your Advally dashboard always matches what is actually live on your site.

What changed: The plugin now sends a short daily summary of its current settings to Advally in the background - which features are enabled, your ads.txt options, your ad unit layout, and version information. This runs once a day and does not change how ads are served or how your forum performs. Your plugin's private API credentials are never included in this summary.

Upgrade: Download the archive, then in your XenForo Admin control panel go to Add-ons, choose Install/upgrade from archive, select the file, and confirm. Your existing settings carry forward with no changes needed.

Rollback: Reinstall the previous archive from the same Add-ons screen if you need to revert.

Compatibility: XenForo 2.2 and 2.3, PHP 8.x. No plan or configuration changes required.

This update adds in-product help and fixes a couple of ad placement issues.

New: the Advally Modules admin page now has a help panel that explains how to confirm ads are actually live on your site. The panel can be dismissed and will stay closed once you have read it.

Fixes: navigation links are no longer blocked by an ad overlay, and the staff bar is no longer hidden behind an ad unit. We also hardened internal error logging.

To update: in your XenForo Admin Control Panel, go to Add-ons, then Install/upgrade from archive, and upload this release. Your existing settings carry forward. No configuration changes are required.