Rotation Settings

The main setting for enabling rotation. You can disable it if you don't need it—this saves server resources.

• Refresh (Rotate) thumbs every X minutes - how often to redraw pages.

This sets how many recent impressions are used to calculate thumb CTR. It's important for preventing thumbs from staying at the top indefinitely. For example, if set to 20,000, the CTR is based on the last 20,000 impressions; if set to 1,000, only the last 1,000 impressions are counted.

For example, let's reduce it to 10 impressions:

1 - 5%
2 - 5%
3 - 5%
4 - 4%
5 - 4%
6 - 4%
7 - 3%
8 - 4%
9 - 3%
10 - 3%

if we set CTR Recalculation period = 10 impressions, then thumb CTR = 4%, if CTR Recalculation period = 5, then thumb CTR (6 - 4% + 7 - 3% + 8 - 4% + 9 - 3% + 10 - 3%) = 3.4%

% of test places on page - When new thumbs enter the active list, some page positions are reserved for testing to determine their CTR. These are selected randomly, excluding the top 5 positions.

New thumbs timelive is the number of impressions needed before a thumb is considered tested and rotated alongside all others.

What is Cell K - Cell K adjusts for the fact that thumbs in top positions naturally get more clicks than those at the bottom. By dividing a thumb's CTR by its Cell K value, you can fairly compare performance across positions. For example, if the top position has K = 2 and the bottom has K = 1, then 2 clicks on the top thumb counts the same as 1 click on the bottom one.

You can manually set Cell K values in Rotation - Cell Stats. This is useful when traffic is low, since automated calculation may be inaccurate with limited data. If you set Cell K manually, enable Recalculate Cell K = NO so the script won't overwrite your values.

The script can also calculate Cell K automatically (Recalculate Cell K = YES). You can see the calculated K values in Rotation - Cell Stats.

Use Cell K - When enabled, this does two things:

• The script calculates thumb CTR accounting for Cell K
• The script places the highest-performing thumb in the position with the highest K value. This is usually the top position, but it can vary—for example, side positions are often more clickable than center ones. As a result, the order shown in the admin panel (sorted by CTR) may not exactly match the actual page positions.

Recalculate Cell K - The script can calculate Cell K automatically, but on small sites (up to 5k impressions) with limited traffic, the calculations may be inaccurate. In such cases, manually set Cell K values instead (see Cell Stats). Set this to NO if you're managing Cell K manually, or YES if you want the script to calculate them automatically.

Use Cell K - Enable or disable the use of Cell K. You can set Cell K values but temporarily disable them without losing your configuration.

Alternative thumb hosts - Browsers limit the number of simultaneous connections per domain. For example, older versions of IE could only load 4 images at once. By distributing images across multiple hosts (subdomains or aliases), you can load more images simultaneously. With 2 hosts, you can load 8 images at once; with 3 hosts, 12 images, etc., speeding up page loads. To set this up, create subdomains like img.domain.com, img2.domain.com, and so on, all pointing to your main domain. Contact your admin to set up the subdomains.

Enter only the domain part in Alt Hosts, not the full URL. For example, if your thumb URL is http://domain.com/scj/thumbs/1.jpg and you set Alt Hosts to img1.domain.com,img2.domain.com,img3.domain.com, the script will randomly replace domain.com with one of the subdomains, resulting in URLs like http://img2.domain.com/scj/thumbs/1.jpg. This applies to all thumbs on the page.

Graber Connection settings These are settings for the thumbnail grabber (used to download thumbnails from galleries). They include proxy settings if your server IP is blocked somewhere. This is rarely needed.

Settings where to save grabbed thumbs. You can save them on the same server where the script is installed or on another one, as often said - a thumb server. The main thing here is not to confuse PATH and URL.

For remote server: For example, we have server1 where cj.com is located. And we have server2 where domain thumbs.com is located, where we want to store thumbs. On the 2nd server we create a directory where we want to save thumbs, for example by FTP the path becomes /thumbs.com/public_html/thumbs_cj/.

On cj.com we specify FTP Host\Login\Pass for the remote server and Destination directory on FTP server = /thumbs.com/public_html/thumbs_cj/, that is, the PATH on FTP where we need to save thumbs. In URL to FTP directory we specify the URL to the same place = http://thumbs.com/thumbs_cj/ Pay attention to the difference between URL and PATH.

The thumb saving system is very simple: for example, we have a thumb with ID = 123456. It will be saved as /thumbs.com/public_html/thumbs_cj/123/456.jpg The URL to it will be recorded in the database http://thumbs.com/thumbs_cj/123/456.jpg

Later, if you use Alt Hosts, the script will change the host in the resulting URL to an alt host. For example, if alt host img1.thumbs.com, img2.thumbs.com, then the thumb URL will be http://img1.thumbs.com/thumbs_cj/123/456.jpg or http://img2.thumbs.com/thumbs_cj/123/456.jpg (alt host changes randomly)

When moving ready thumbs to a new host, the following problem may occur:

• Thumbs were added with “save locally” settings and URL to data = /scj/thumbs
• for example, a thumb with ID = 123456 was added. It got URL /scj/thumbs/123/456.jpg in the database
• then a remote host for thumbs is created but there the thumb URL is different, for example http://imghost/something/thumbs
• and Alternative hosts = imghost is set, hoping that somehow old thumbs will get URL http://imghost/something/thumbs/123/456.jpg. But the URL actually becomes http://imghost/scj/thumbs/123/456.jpg because the thumb already has URL /scj/thumbs/123/456.jpg in the database and the alt host is simply added to it

What to do It's not hard to notice that the problem is that before it saved with path /scj/thumbs/ and now it needs to be /something/thumbs/. There are 2 options:

1. Make a backup. Go to list thumbs - massedit and change the thumb URLs. This option may not work if there's a large database.
2. Make a backup. Go to phpmyadmin and do UPDATE rot_galleries SET thumb_url = REPLACE(thumb_url, '/scj/thumbs/', '/something/thumbs/') - this option is fast

If this instruction seems complicated - show it to your admin (admin is not script support)

Here you can note that thumbs can be created in 2 ways: GD or IM (Image Magick) - this is reflected in the Image Lib parameter. GD is a built-in PHP library, IM is an external library. If you use IM (which is usually preferable), you need to specify the path in Path to IM. The path is usually /usr/local/bin/ or /usr/bin/. In this field you can see autodetect if the script finds the path automatically.

Replace specials (ampersand to %26) - according to RFC (documentation for all protocols), if you have ampersands & in the gallery URL, they must be replaced with %26. This is done for the following reason. Suppose we have URL

/out.php?url=http://gallery.com/&p=60

that is, the content URL is http://gallery.com/, skim - 60. But suppose we have such a gallery URL

/out.php?url=http://gallery.com/gallery.php?wm_id=5&template=6&p=60

…gallery.com/gallery.php?wm_id=5&template=6&p=60 in this line it's hard for the script to understand if &template=6 belongs to gallery parameters or out. In such cases, & is replaced with %26, for example in our case it will look like

/out.php?url=http://gallery.com/gallery.php?wm_id=5%26template=6&p=60

by default this option is enabled and there's no need to disable it :)

Encode urls - in the normal case, URLs on the site front end look like:

/out.php?url=http://gallery.com/&p=60,

so the surfer can simply cut the gallery URL from the URL. To hide it, you can encode the URLs, for example base64- then they will look like /out.php?url=b64hghh3j3nddbHh32nd&p=60. That is, the rotation script encodes URLs when creating the page, and out decodes them. There are 2 points of view on this option: on the one hand yes, URLs are encoded, the surfer cannot bypass out, but on the other hand, if the surfer can cut the gallery URL and doesn't mind doing it - he is unlikely to buy anything, besides, some are just scared by such clever URLs.

Check galleries check galleries in the database for functionality, that is, whether they open. If a gallery doesn't open - the script will temporarily suspend it, and check again after some time and if everything is OK, it activates it again.

New Rotation: test all thumbs from each gallery first

For example, a gallery has 3 thumbs in rotation.

• Take best ASAP - means we took thumb 1 from the gallery, if it got a good CTR after testing - it will immediately appear on the first page. The rest are tested normally and if conditionally the 2nd or 3rd gets the best CTR, it will be shown.
• Test all thumb - this means that even if after testing the 1st got a good CTR, we don't show it on the first page, but first test the remaining 2 in the same way, and only after all 3 thumbs are tested - select the best one and show it on the first page.

Before 50 there were 2 parameters for testing thumbs - % of test places on page (for example 15%, means if there are 100 places for thumbs on the page then 15 places will go for test impressions) and Test positions start (so that new thumbs are not tested at the very top, and at the top there are always only already rotated thumbs). In 50, Test positions end was added so we don't test thumbs at the last positions of the page where they might get very few clicks. Relevant for sites with high traffic. By default it's set to 0 - means test at any position on the page.

In the rotation test settings, a new feature aimed at increasing the uniqueness of sponsor traffic. Suppose we have 3 sponsors and we display 5 thumbs. It might look something like 1 1 1 2 3 by sponsors (it turned out this way by CTR). All thumbs of sponsor 1 will be in the top positions and are more likely to get more clicks. We can slightly mix them to get something like 1 2 1 3 1. This will of course break the CTR order, but theoretically increase the uniqueness at the sponsor.

But we also don't want to mix too much, because it will already violate productivity more. For example Max Distance - 5. This means if there are more than 5 thumbs between thumbs of different sponsors - we won't move them, so that thumbs from the very bottom don't go to the top.

By default it's set to 0 = don't mix.