Freestar Ads

Description

Freestar Ads connects a WordPress site to your existing Freestar advertising account. Enter the site slug Freestar gave you, choose who should see ads, and the plugin loads Freestar’s pubfig.js tag with the correct attributes and connection hints. It can also keep your ads.txt current by redirecting it to the copy Freestar maintains for you.

This plugin is an interface to Freestar, an external advertising service. It does nothing until you connect it, and it requires a Freestar publisher account to be useful.

Features

• Loads the Freestar pubfig.js ad tag and its companion stylesheet with async and data-cfasync="false", plus preconnect hints for the ad delivery hosts.
• Accepts a slug or a domain. Periods and other non-alphanumeric characters become dashes, so welcome.freestar.com resolves to welcome-freestar-com. The settings screen previews the exact URL before you save.
• Restrict ads to administrators only, so you can verify placements before going live.
• Optional Dynamic Ads.txt support: answers requests for /ads.txt with a 301 to your Freestar-hosted file, with a built-in check that reports what a crawler actually receives.
• Never injects tags into wp-admin, and suppresses them on WooCommerce checkout pages.

External service: Freestar

This plugin relies on Freestar, a third-party advertising service operated by Freestar, and on Blockthrough, a separate third party used by the ad tag for ad-block recovery. You need a Freestar publisher account to use it.

No external host is contacted until you press the “I’m a Freestar Publisher” button in the plugin settings. Until then the settings screen shows nothing but that button and this disclosure, the plugin adds nothing to your pages, and it makes no outbound requests, not even connection hints. The date, time, and user who connected are recorded, and a “Disconnect from Freestar” button at the foot of the settings screen stops all external contact again.

Once connected, and only once you have also entered your site slug, visitors’ browsers contact the following hosts:

• a.pub.network — serves the pubfig.js ad tag, its stylesheet, and the hosted ads.txt file.
• b.pub.network, c.pub.network, d.pub.network — Freestar ad delivery and site configuration.
• btloader.com and api.btloader.com — Blockthrough ad-block recovery, a separate third-party service loaded by the ad tag.

Serving advertising inherently involves processing visitor data. Freestar and its advertising partners may process information including IP address, device and browser details, approximate location, pages viewed, and advertising identifiers such as cookies. The plugin itself sends no data to Freestar from your server; the requests are made by your visitors’ browsers when the tag loads.

If you enable the ads.txt option, requests to your /ads.txt are redirected to a.pub.network, which means the requesting client (usually an advertising crawler) contacts Freestar.

Service and policy links:

• Service: https://freestar.com/
• Freestar privacy policy: https://freestar.com/privacy-policy/
• Publisher privacy information: https://freestar.com/privacy-policies-for-publishers/

You are responsible for disclosing this in your own privacy policy and for obtaining any visitor consent your jurisdiction requires. The plugin adds suggested wording to the WordPress privacy policy tool under Settings → Privacy to help you get started. This plugin does not and cannot guarantee legal compliance.