The problem is that it is attempting to format and correct the code that is entered. It seems to only be expecting html and nothing else. However, having said that, when I tried to insert an iframe, it simply broke the entire thing and boiled the coding down to 3 useless items.
It seems that the last update for the plugin was 3 months ago http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/mingle-forum/
However, it also seems that users have just started having this problem, so it could be a compatibility issue with the latest version of wordpress and mingle forum.
You can see others with the same issue within the forum (links below) and everyone that I can find seems to have reported this issue on or after April 12th!
http://cartpauj.icomnow.com/forum/mingle-forum-plugin-group1/support-forum6/forum-ads-not-working-thread2575/
http://cartpauj.icomnow.com/forum/mingle-forum-plugin-group1/support-forum6/mingle-forum-ads-not-working-thread2493/
I hope they get it fixed soon, but it may not be an issue directly with the plugin.
I have been playing around and checking the mingle forum homepage.
I noticed that the forum was displaying adverts below the first post. I viewed the source code and could see that the adverts were within the same class used for the “below first post” advert slot within mingle forum.
However, it is worth noting that the coding that had been used was html coding. AdSense and other systems are not just html and as such they can break.
To test this, you can enter a fake html advert. It will not show anything on the front end, but you will see that html does save correctly.
It is likely that the plugin developer has not noticed this issue as they use standard html and not javascript. If you enter anything except html, it will entirely break it.
Use this to test that it saves:
<a href="http://domain.com"><img src=http://domain.com/image.jpg /></a>
Unfortunately, its rather worse than you would have hoped to see. This issue seems to have been first reported on Jul 16 2011 within the developers forum. The developer came into the forum and replied a few times, stating that adverts were working for him.
At the time they may have been, but it seems that later, a wordpress update caused the adverts to break.
The last reply from the developer was on Jul 17 2011.
You can view the thread here: http://cartpauj.icomnow.com/forum/mingle-forum-plugin-group1/support-forum6/google-adsense-ad-not-showing-thread1709.0/
Having read the thread (and most of the forum) and having seen the same thing happen over and over again with free plugins, I honestly wonder why we continue to rely on free plugins. So many times, developers of great open source plugins abandon their projects because it is taking up too much of their time and money to be able to develop the plugin and provide any level of support.
This leaves many people who are using the plugin with no support. In the case of Mingle Forum, there have been at least 180,862 downloads.
If you check the developers profile on WordPress, the last reply that they made to a thread was 141 days ago! The last update that they made to the plugin on WordPress was 64 days ago. If they updated the plugin just 64 days ago, it makes you wonder why they have not replied to recent posts within their forum that are more than 64 days old. I guess that they just do not have the time.
They have released a new version of Mingle Forum, but unfortunately, it does not address the problem we are facing with ads.
Unfortunately, it seems that this plugin is a dead end if you plan to use the advert option. The developer does not seem to be addressing the issues within their own forum about the plugin. A real disappointment.
Another version has been released, but again it does not fix the issue with ads. Maybe the developer is addressing the issues that have been reported for a long time, even though they stated on the WordPress repository listing that it worked.
I tried to add the patch highlighted by cartpauj, plugin author, but I cannot find the lines to substitute.
Why this issue has been tagged as “resolved” even if many user and I cannot use ads options?
Many thanks.
The next version of Mingle Forum should address this a bit better as well.
