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## Advertisements

###### Andrew Kirmse/ 25 January 1996

The Meridian client can display up to 2 advertisements in its character selection dialog. Clicking on an advertisement opens the user's Web browser on a URL associated with the advertisement, and logs the advertisement and user names in the server log. An ad is an AVI file with no sound.

Client side

On the client side, advertisements are stored in the "ads" subdirectory of the client installation. A message from the server identifies which two advertisements to display in the character selection dialog. Here is a description of how to make advertisement AVI files (Word file).

If a client update consists solely of advertisement files, the normal download dialog is not displayed. Instead, the client shows a small dialog with the words "Performing routine maintenance" while the advertisements are downloaded.

Server side

The advertisement filenames and associated URLs are set in the server's configuration file (blakserv.cfg). In the [Advertise] section, the keys File1 and File2 point to the two AVI filenames. The keys Url1 and Url2 point to the associated URLs. The default setup is

  `[Advertise]`
  `File1=ad1.avi`
  `Url1=http://www.3do.com`
  `File2=ad2.avi`
  `Url2=http://www.microsoft.com`

These can be changed dynamically with the "set config" administrator command. Any changes should be saved by also issuing the "save config" command.

Updating advertisements

Advertisements are updated via the normal client update mechanism. First, build a package containing the new AVI files, using the arq program. By convention, packages are named pkg####$.avi, where #### gives the month and day, and $ is a sequence letter for each day, starting at "a".

Example (typed at the command line):

`arq -a pkg0125a newad1.avi`

Next, add a line to the end of the server's packages.txt file, containing the package name, a new sequence number, and the package type number 24. (If you want guests to also download the new advertisement, use the package type number 56. However, this is not recommended, since it forces guests to do a download when they log in.)

Example (new line in packages.txt file):

`pkg0125a.arq 50 24`

where the sequence number 50 is one more than the number appearing in the previous line of packages.txt.

Finally, type the command "reload packages" in administrator mode. If the server is not running when the packages.txt file is modified, this step is not necessary; the file will be reread when the server starts.