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Don't Ever Delete Referral Banners - Replace Them

Yes, I've learned over the years that it is a best practice to replace referral banners rather than deleting them (even if they contain outdated information!)

Think about it.  If you delete a referral banner then any forum posts or sites that your loyal members have already placed them at instantly are shown as a bad image link (you know, the banner outline with the red 'X' indicating a dead image link.)  Making the image presentation go bad on your member's referral posts is just a shame and waste of the opportunity to keep valuable good posts concerning your site looking in tip top shape.

In the ShiftCode admin panel the procedure of accomplishing this isn't immediately obvious.  In the Referral Links Banners section (Membership>Referral Links) when you choose "Edit" and upload a new banner then yes, it will upload the new banner and delete the old one in that position but doing this will also change the name of the new banner (thereby making links to the old banner go dead.)

The (Membership>Referral Links) section in the admin always replaces the names of all uploaded banners with a number incremented file name -- The File Manager doesn't !

A better way of accomplishing this is to go to the File Manager (on the right menu in the admin panel), select /images/banners, delete the unwanted banner, rename the new banner using the name of the old banner (exactly), and upload the new banner (thereby replacing the old banner with the new banner under the old banner's name.)  Also the new banner should be of the same type (extension: gif, jpg, etc.)

When doing this also note the old banner's size (dimensions) and use a banner of the same dimensions to replace it (so that wherever the banner had been placed by members in their referral posts, the formatting doesn't change.)

On a related note you may want to review the online ad industry standard banner sizes.  The most common banner size in the GPT site business is 468 x 60 (pixels) so I would recommend that you have at least one banner of these dimensions.  This page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_banner#Standard_sizes shows all the other standard banner image sizes.

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