Dynamic trading schemes
A complete description.

- These are trading schemes that can be modified using schedules or/and conditions.

What's it for?

1. Automatic trading return ratio maintenance. Let's say you want to send your traders 110% of the traffic that you got from them. Your site can be over-productive (there's an 'overflow' - you have to raise your *skimming) or under-productive (traders don't receive enough traffic, you have to decrease your skimming. This way, if you change your trading scheme (in other words, your skimming), you affect your trading return ratio.

2. Skimming changes depending on hours and days of the week. It is well known that there are daily traffic decreases/increases. It is obviously linked to human physiology - people usually sleep at night and go online in the morning and in the afternoon. That's why when it's night in the USA (Americans represent a huge part of visitors) there is less traffic on all the websites, yours and your trade partners'. Now imagine - during the period of traffic decrease (which can be determined by a glance at hourly stats) you set your skimming to 30% from 60%. The script will send more traffic to traders! When the traffic evens out, the script will automatically change the values back. Your return ratio during this traffic decrease will be even higher, therefore you will have a better placement on your partners' sites. Please note that these results can only be achieved if you use a dynamic trading scheme. The same goes for week-end traffic decreases - you can set a low skimming dynamic scheme for Saturdays and Sundays.

* Skimming - traffic proportion that goes to galleries.

Dynamic scheme : principles of operation.

 A trading scheme can have unlimited rules (conditions) which will modify the scheme when confirmed. Every rule has its own weight (rule priority) - the 'heavier' the rule, the earlier this rule will be checked. If a rule worked, then the other rules (that have less priority) will not be checked. If a scheme is working, other conditions will not be checked during that time. If a scheme has expired and no other scheme is supposed to be activated, the default scheme will be activated.
If a dynamic scheme is active, elapsed time will be shown in the corresponding column 'In Use', otherwise this column will be empty.
In order to transform a normal scheme to a dynamic scheme, you'll have to:

1. 1. Go to menu Settings -> Trade Schemes, check the box 'Use Dynamic' next to the desired trading scheme and click 'Update'.
   

2. Click 'Edit' and set rules for this dynamic scheme

Dynamic schemes can be activated on schedule or when a condition is met.

Scheduled scheme activation.

This is really easy - the format is similar to cron tasks schedule, you set the time when a scheme will be activated. In the 'Duration' field you can set the duration (in minutes) of a scheme. Here is the format for time settings:
 

• * - means 'each'.

• Use hyphens to set ranges.

• Separate multiple values by commas

 Examples:
 * 7 * * * - every minute, every day at 7 o'clock AM
0-15 10 * * 1 - first 15 minutes of the 10th hour every Monday
10-20 20 * * 5 - every Friday at 20.00, 10-20 minutes
* 10-15 * * 0,5,6 - on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10.00 - 15.00

IMPORTANT! Taking into account cron specifics in Proton (in fact, there is no cron, stats are only recalculated every 2 minutes if the site gets some traffic; the more traffic you get the more precise stats are) I would recommend using a time range when setting a starting time. Someone will visit the site and initiate cron launch.
Expired tasks will not be launched!

Conditioned scheme activation.

Condition1 is compared to Condition2 using a sign. You can use 30 predefined variables, constants and operations between them.
For example :

condition1	sign	condition2
$Dout/($Din+1)	>=	0.8

- dynamic scheme will be activated if $Dout/($Din+1) ratio will be higher or equal to 0.8

IMPORTANT! If you are using fractions, add 1 to the denominator. It will avoid having a zero divide in some cases. List of available variables:
 

IMPORTANT!

• Variables are case-sensitive. Please use them exactly the same way as they are shown in the table above. To copy a variable in the clipboard please click on its button - this is to make your life easier.

If you know how this feature could be improved or if you need more options, feel free to mail me at protontm@gmail.com - if I like the idea, I will definitely upgrade the script.

Good Luck!