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perry-mitchell/ads.txt

Last active August 8, 2019 06:37
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RFC: Ads.txt chaining
Raw
ads.txt
# Sample publisher ads.txt
somenetwork.com, 1234, DIRECT
another.org, 4455abc, RESELLER
# !include https://managednetwork.com/managed.ads.txt.php?id=123
Raw
managed.ads.txt
# Included ads.txt from initial site
advertiser.com, 9999, RESELLER
network.co.uk, 123400, RESELLER
@dec5e
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dec5e commented Aug 7, 2019

If you replace $include with #include like this:

#include https://managednetwork.com/managed.ads.txt.php?id=123

it would help to gradually start using this feature without breaking old ads.txt scrapers - they would ignore this line as a comment.

@perry-mitchell
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@dec5e Good point! Graceful fallback. It'd still fail of course as the new lines wouldn't be read on older fetchers, but at least parsing wouldn't fail. The only problem with that approach is that regular comments could include the "include" word as part of a regular comment, and then fail. Eg:

# My ads.txt
#
# This ads.txt was generated by some bot, and it should
# include the correct amount of lines

So for cases like that it'd be tricky. Maybe best to still have it prefixed inside the comment?

# My ads.txt
somenetwork.com, 1234, RESELLER

# !include https://site.com/ads.txt

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