I have a small issue. The script outputs the links in source code with unencoded ampersands.
When viewing source I might see this:

....k.com/rbs_banner.php?id=4&userid=40847"....

But I want to see this:

....k.com/rbs_banner.php?id=4&userid=40847"....

The reason is because it won't validate in W3C. Can someone tell me what adjustment to make in php perhaps so those can be encoded with an htmlentities or something?

Thanks!

Sorry I don't know the answer. But a question: What advantage does validation in W3C give you? I mean, does it work as it is, and if so, why should you want to change it?

Because it's good to follow standards. And when it comes to encoding html entities, it's safer in terms of URL hack attempts and MySQL injections.
It's common and normal practice to always encode URLs. Plus there is the satisfaction of having valid markup.

I imagine it is a very small thing indeed to encode the URL before echoing it, which is why somebody might know what file needs the edit added.

OK, I'm probably being very thick here.. but I am confuzzled.

addons
upload
product-rbs
Rotating Banner System-EN

The above looks fine.
But when I look in the 'addons' folder, I've no idea where to put the rbs_iframa.php file. :(

Then in the 'upload' folder, I know where to put the details of the 'admincp' folder and the 'includes' folder.. but where do the three other files go? rbs_banner.php - rbs_stats.php - rbs_wrapper

I've read the PDF but don't really understand it when it says place them in the forum home.

1) Don't screw with addons until you have it working. Then if you really need that iframe, go for it.
2) Don't over think it. Just rename 'uploads' to 'forum' (or wherever you have your forum installed), then in an FTP program just drop it on /public_html. Everything will go where it belongs.

I installed and uploaded files but I am not seeing "Advertising" in admincp

It's supposed to be on the left pane just above Styles and Templates (vb4 only). If you can't find it anywhere, you should do some searches at vb.com and try to figure out why it's missing.

Thanks for this.
So when I go into my folder named 'forum', I just stick the three files there? ( rbs_banner.php - rbs_stats.php - rbs_wrapper )

I've installed odd plugins successfully in the past, but still manage to confuse myself!

Edit: I think I've failed..

I have this error message appearing at the very top of my forum:

Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter in [path]\includes\functions.php(7246) : eval()'d code on line 93

Thanks for your responses.

That doesn't sound like an RBS error. But a site search (on 'Empty delimiter') turns up lots of hits here on vb.org and I imagine vb.com also. You're going to have to dig through some of those old threads and see what the problem is.

Yes, those files go in your forum root right next to register.php and forum.php.

Yes that's what I was looking for! I had searched in all the included files but never looked in the xml itself. I hope this is the only location in code where the URLs are formed or I may have to make this change elsewhere.

Now the developer needs to add this to the source too.

Thanks!

That video tutorial is horrible. Can someone just make a Youtube vid (with audio) tut for us that are visual?

Also, does this work for 4.1.10/11?

Yep It works on 4.1.11

grazzie mille y2ksw!

the mod is just great. I installed it and everybody on my site will love it surely.

I only regret that I can't use specific paramteres with the links, such as rel=nofollow

ciao!

Hi what do you mean by this? I want to resize some banners but none of the banners I'm using are flash based. I tried putting the values into the flash banner sizes and nothing happened.

Awesome I've been using this, so far so good.

Can i ask a question though?

Is there anyway you can make this addon track clicks even if we don't use an image?

I'd assume if we use an image and a link url, the system will generate a unique link for the ad, that when clicked will add a click to the counter. Is there any way you can have the add-on display this link for us on the manage banner screen so we can put this link into the ad text manually?

The reason I say this is because I use this addon to display text ads, and not banners, but would still be able to track clicks on these ads as well, I believe generating the unique URL for us without requiring an image would be awesome.

Apparently, this add on has closed my forum.

''This service is unavailable''.
I will remove all the uploaded stuff and hopefully it sorts it?
I can not get on the forum to remove or disable the add on.

That's why they say you should backup your database and files prior to installing new modifications :) Just sayin...

Delete the files you uploaded via FTP and delete the tables from your database created by the addon, that's a start.

I just noticed that the click tracking URL for image banners is not randomized at all.

A user could essentially take this url, and keep refreshing it in their browser over and over to simulate clicks on someone's ad.

If the URL was randomized before it's loaded, you could eliminate this and could cover up the banner id and user id from the URL.

Is this possible?

Even if some terrible error is preventing the forum from loading, you should still be able to get to the Admin Control Panel as it doesn't display banners.
http://myforum.com/forum/admincp/index.php

Yes, thanks. They have been removed.
I get confused with the whole backing up thing.. how long does it take and is it difficult?
I didn't get to see the email errors until today when they were sent to me from a different email.

I can not get on to it, but I have a feeling I could before the hosting company did something that took down all three of the forums we have.

I'm not sure why it happened. Pity really!
Just waiting on them to check it now and see what the story is.

backing up is VERY important. in my opinion if you're a webmaster small or large getting used to creating backups is one of the first things you should learn.

essentially when you do a backup, all you're doing is downloading your website files to your computer, and downloading your website database to your computer.

You can download your site's files/folders via FTP, I use filezilla.

You can download your site's database via your PhpMyAdmin on your sever, select the database associated with your forum and export it.

Hope that helps, there's plenty of info regarding how to do a backup scattered throughout this forum and on the net, get in the habit. Create a folder on your harddrive just for backups and keep a copy of everything you have online, offline. that's just my .02 cents.

I'll learn that and get in the habit of it.. how long does it take to do, on average?

( in response to the post after this; Sorry @ Videx.. I did actually think of that when I came to check on this thread. My bad!

This is not really the thread to be discussing backup strategies. Do a search here and at vb.com and you'll find a lot of things. On my shared server, I do a full website backup monthly via cpanel, download it overnight, then put it on one of two removable hard drives which are swapped out alternately and one is always kept off-premises.

I backup my db daily using a cron php script, and using DOS batch files I automatically download those every day at noon.

It takes me a minute to log into cpanel, and again to FTP, but averaged out I doubt it comes to a second per day.

y2ksw?

What do you think guys?

You don't want to pass all of your PR juice to advertisers, do you?

We only have a few paid sponsors at any given moment, and one of the few things we can offer them is to raise their rankings by appearing on our busy site. I sure wouldn't want to try to cut off the search engines from their ads with nofollow.

I respect your opinion Videx but beg to differ.

My advertisers paid to display their banners on my site, and they get that.

I don't want to lose my PR to them by providing them with links on every single page

is this mod still supported?

click tracking doesn't seem to be working.

running 4.0.7

The link redirect works, the impression is counted, however no clicks are shown in the banner statistics.

Would it be possible to do this with ajax instead of using an iframe?

could this be used to add a rel="nofollow" to links??

You are laboring under a widespread but nonetheless false understanding of how a page passes PageRank. A link pointing to another page is a "vote" for the destination page and may add PageRank to that destination page. The originating page loses nothing.

The equation for this is:

PR passed = .85 * {PR of originating page} / {total # outgoing links on the originating page, incl. internal navigation links}

Note that using nofollow still counts as an outgoing link in this equation.

Thank you djbaxter for your kind reply. I appreciate your taking the time to do so.



That is not what I learned. I?d appreciate it if you could sustain your argument with any solid proof from the horse?s mouth (google in this case)

Dj, such formula, if correct, would not be something that google published. So where does this come from Sir?
I?d appreciate it if you could provide any solid argument on this.

In fact, if that were true, my site should not be at all having any issues with PR because we have literally thousands of back links in facebook group discussions. Facebook as you surely know is a PR9.

My site used to be a PR4 for many years. It recently, in an enigma lost more than half a million of pages in google?s index (as estimated by site:mysite) and dropped to PR2. Despite thousands of back-links on Facebook groups, we are still PR2 and not moving any inch forward. The same can be said about the number of pages in Google index: stable at 150-200K.

Kindly check this where I explain this issue
http://forums.seochat.com/link-popul...rs-457075.html

Sir, if the nofollow has no effect on your PR, why do big sites such as Facebook add target="_blank" rel="nofollow nofollow" to every single external link?

Sure. Look up the original patent for PageRank. It's in there.

See the original patent.

As you yourself point out below, Facebook links are nofollow so they do not pass PR to you. Besides, there are other factors that may discount whether or how much PR is passed to your page by a link from another site. If you have kept up with Google updates over the years, you would know this.

1. Panda updates.
2. Recent additional updates targeting the value of certain types of links and content.
3. As I said, you yourself point out that those Facebook links are nofollow.

This is not rocket science.

Largely as a spam deterrent. And the target=_"blank" part opens the link target in a new browser tab or window. Nothing to do with PR.

Hi guys, I just installed this mod, and its great! Well done to the creator of it.

Just one question, and I apologise in advance if this has been covered somewhere in the 123 pages of this thread so far, but I figured it'd be faster to just ask here than look through every page for an answer. Is there some code I can add to give me more margin space between my banner and everything around it? I've used it in ad_navbar_below but my banner is really close to some of the page link text above it, where its easy to accidentally click on the ad banner instead of the page link text. Eg, the ad banner sits really close to where I have: "Forum>my website name>General Discussion, and I'd like to move it down the page slightly.

You may insert into your text banner the click tracker and refer to the banner id itself. We have talked about it several times here in this thread, last time not too long ago.

This is a pure HTML question. You may put a div tag around the placeholder with the necessary margins.

No matter how hard you try to keep your PR up, it doesn't work any more for already quite some time as it had before, because as far as I know, Google has not renewed their rights on a relative patent held by somebody else.

Also, the "ranking" (i.e. at which position your pages show in searches) is undergoing a lot of changes lately, all of which are favouring real information and penalizing "page rank thiefs".

Under these aspects, follow or nofollow have not a lot of meaning towards ranking, at most it does mean now the real thing: follow or leave that link ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

It is something which in fact was published world-wide by its inventor :)

The formula is far more complex but essentially the incoming page rank was somewhat (0.85 + adjustment) * (1/(# links on a page)). Thus it was a good idea to have very few links on the originating page.

Talking about most forums and sites, they have so many links on a page that looking for a good ranking was simply impossible.

For this reason, I believe Google has abbandoned the "old" ranking formula and now looks for better ways, giving a lot of SEO masters headache. Fortunately, genuine information is the winner, and always was. Thus, if you want to index your site well, produce real information :)

The outgoing link is just voting that link.

The page from where you advertise from (originator) will loose a little of ranking, but you would loose it with any kind of link, internal or external. However, since ranking has changed, you should concern more about information. Now, good information adds way more rank, than a number or less of links to another site subtracts from.