yes. time permitted

Hello, I have integrated questions2answers with vBulletin at http://www.noblood.org/answers/.

Although I realize Rotating Banner System is designed to run with vB, I am thinking that I can possibly call this mod from q2a. I have already implemented common user login with vB.

I can fish through the RBS code see how/where to wire it up with q2a.

Anyone else gone down this road?

Thank you :)

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...08#post2125608

Somewhere near to this post this argument was discussed extensively :)

2.4.0 update installed with thanks.... :)

Regards,
Doug

Sorry it took so long, but getting a new Google Publisher ID was much more time consuming than expected, and after that I had no time ;)

I went back 5 pages and couldn't find any instructions on how to do this, not looking forward to going through all 100+ of them.

Maybe add a note in the instructions or in the thread somewhere ;) ?

I did try using just the standard URL with the bannerid in the ad and not the userid and it didn't result in any clicks being tracked. id forumname.com/rbs_banners.php?id=11 will redirect to the proper URL but no clicks are tracked.

Edit - I just found out that clicks don't track if you go straight to the URL in your browser, you have to physically click the link shown via rbs :) lol, thanks. I was testing it by just pasting the URL with the banner ID into my browser and no clicks were showing :/

So will this still work if we change the name of the rbs_banner.php file? Just so I can have a pretty URL at the bottom.

So the links might show something like myforum.com/goodstuff.php?id=26 as the URL instead of myforum.com/rbs_banner.php

Ciao y2ksw,

Grazzie Mille for your very kind answers to djbaxter's post and mines. I highly appreciate your feedback and stand corrected.

I can't thank you enough for this great add-on. I believe vbulletin should pay you and adopt it in their core code.

Just to clarify, you guys are all wrong about the pagerank thing.

If you understood what pagerank actually 'is', you'd have a better understanding of how to properly use nofollow.

Page rank is by definition, simply put, a calculation of the likelihood that a person entering the internet randomly clicking on links will land on any particular site.

The higher the chances of a person entering the internet randomly clicking links will land on your site, the higher your page rank. Go read up on it, go to wikipedia first, if you're unsure of my validity.

Think about it like this, facebook.

The chances of a person entering the internet randomly clicking links landing on facebook is extremly high if not almost guaranteed, which is why facebook has a pagerank of 9 or 10. Same with wikipedia, amazon, ebay, twitter, etc.

A link from pages with high page rank on these sites increases your pagerank because, again simply put, the chances of a person landing on the page your link is on is pretty high, thus making the chances of a user landing on your site higher, thus increasing your page rank.

This is why blasting out hundreds or thousands of those crap forum profile links does not mean you'll necessarily get ANY page rank, because chances are slim to none a person entering the internet randomly clicking links will ever land on your forum profile, therefore passing virtually ZERO pagerank.

So, understanding what pagerank IS... you will not LOSE pagerank by placing external links on your site (this does not decrease the chances of a person landing on your site), however you will PASS pagerank via the links on your site.

Pagerank is distributed EVENLY throughout all DOFOLLOW links on a page, once again simply put, all nofollow does is disallow the passage of pagerank to that site. NOFOLLOW tags eliminate that link from Google's 'graph of the web' thus eliminating it from their calculations when determining the 'chances a user entering the internet randomly clicking on links' will land on your site.

If you put nofollow tags on all the external RBS links, the only upside for YOU is you're distributing a little more pagerank throughout your own site from the page the link is on.

In my opinion, depending on how many external links you have in the first place, I honestly wouldn't worry about it.

thank you addamroy,
exactly, I don't want to distribute / pass my pagerank throughout my site to my advertisers.

Excellent post and very well written. :up:

I agree, page rank in a way isn't important, it is important that we create good content, page rank comes after that. Of course, vBSEO helps a lot, but the most important thing is content, we need to have content that people want and that gives us good PR. PR is measure of success we already achieved, not the measure of success we will achieve in distant (or not so distant) future.

Quick question, can anyone help me get the banner statistics page for customers to work inside a custom vbulletin page as shown by lynne here? https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=228112

I'd like to put that banner stats page on a forum page. Basically I followed the instructions in that thread and pasted the content of the rbs_stats.php file into the new template but for some reason it breaks the code and won't work.

If anyone could get this to work, probably going to require fanangaling some code around but I'd appreciate it if someone could help me figure it out!

I will gladly pay someone to help me get this mod working. It's precisely what I need, but I can't seem to get my Image ads to appear (or any others).

Got it working! Just awesome stuff. My sponsors are going to love it.

Ok, it's working perfectly fine, but I'm not so confident in the statistics for each banner. I think the impressions are accurate, but the "clicks" are not. I know this because I've clicked a few myself in testing. I have that option enabled. Also, on the rbs_stats.php, the impressions vary slightly from what I see in "Banner List" for one ad. Not a big deal, but accurate reporting would be helpful to be able to show my sponsors.

Only if they're naive enough to believe it means anything.

Not sure I follow. Accurate impressions and clicks are of great interest to our sponsors - and in the business I run, that's very important. I'm not running Google Adsense ads...I have targeted sponsors and have ongoing communication and dialogue with the owners of those companies. I can provide them with Google Analytics stats for pageviews/etc....but being able to show them how many times their banners were displayed and also clicked would both be valuable metrics.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...hp#post2202969

Here is the last post of a series which is showing how to achieve click tracking with text banners :)

And thanks for your post about page ranks. Although I know very well how it works, your information added some aspects explained much better than I ever could do :)


Anf yes, you may rename the rbs_banner.php file and the call, but then you must remember at every upgrade to make these changes.

The statistics are only reliable in the moment you are taking the snapshot. On busy sites all the counting can advance very fast. Also, some data may arrive later due to the nature of queries pushed into the shutdown queue of queries, and some may never arrive if a service doesn't reply in time.

In the end however, the statistics are very reliable, just try it on a test board and watch what it does. At the backend you may monitor the rbs_* tables, too. Under normal circumstances, every click is traced.

y2k, wanna let me know what the chances are of you looking into this for us?? https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....postcount=1852

I think you missed it :)

I've installed the most recent release. I noticed that if I input a destination URL (for an image), then input the image HTML in the text area, my banners are not clickable. I have to actually input the <a href=" in the text area to have my banners linked. Is that by design? What is the destination URL form used for?

You're overthinking it. The "URL" is where you want someone to go when they click a banner (e.g. http://advertiser.com). The "Image / Flash" is a link to the banner on your site (e.g. "../banners/adbanner.jpg).

Ahhhh....ha! Thank you, I'm an idiot.

Ha! You wanna black magic!

I imagine you are talking about a static HTML page on CMS?

Please try iframe, it's the one ... for example:

Please do the styling with somebody else, I just tried to guess right :)

Not on CMS, just a static page.

The iframe works but there's no way to show a different iframe automatically when an advertiser wants to view their ad statistics. I need the banner stats file itself to be formatted to match the forum.

In this thread here by Lynne, it teaches you how to create your own custom vbulletin page.
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=228112

So what I tried to do was simply, take the code from the rbs banner stats php file and add it to the template for the custom page. The only problem is for some reason when you copy/paste the code from the original stats file into the template for the custom page it breaks the page, it's not formatted correctly.

Any way you can help me (or us) achieve that?

I think that you need to look into template for that page, not php code.

I don't have RBS installed, so I don't know what template is used, but you need code that is in the template.

There is no way to "rotate" also the statistics. If you need the forum styles, you also will have to create a plugin with the styles for those pages and compile the recordsets accordingly for your customers. There is no way to guess which pages are going to show to a customer rather than another. It is not in the scope of this project to show custom pages for statistics to individual customers beyond the simple and plain thing. The iframe-d reports may be included in CMS pages and thus gain the forum style in some way, but still, you will have to filter the pages in some way for each customer and I believe this is not too easy.

If this is going to be a request of say 100 paying users of this product, I may think about it. But just for one, I'm sorry, that's too much work for a small looking, but quite complex addition ;)

You may try to modify the statistics page to make it look better. I believe a fairly clever designer may give it a visual boost via CSS ...

Thanks for the reply but I think you're misunderstanding what I'm getting at entirely.

I understand there's no way to rotate the iframe, I'm not trying to do that.

Let me try to explain this better, because I'm pretty sure it's not as much work as you think it is.

All I'm trying to do, is format your statistics page to look like the forum.

The link I provided, is instructions from Lynne on how to create a custom vbulletin page. Read that thread.

So, the custom page is editable via a custom template in the style manager.

You paste the content of your custom page into this template... Which means, ideally you should be able to copy and paste all code from rbs_stats.php into the custom template.

So now your 'custom page' should be doing the same exact thing rbs_stats is doing.

The only problem is the code is not formatted correctly when you paste it into the new template. It might be as simple as removing a couple <?php's and a couple >'s might solve the problem but I'm not sure.

Does that make more sense?

The statistics are made of PHP code and HTML. There is no way to just paste the contents in a new template and hope it will run. It needs coding (and maintaining) on one side, where the maintainment is my concern.

If I had a page I would also have to follow up each time vBulletin updates. As it is now, I can easily forget about it and keep it going from version 3.6.5 onwards with no additional problems.

If you look into rbs_stats.php, you I have already included the basics, because it is a custom page. But it doesn't use templates, because they wouldn't show on 3.x boards ;)

Ahh I see. Bummer, not as simple as I thought :(

Thanks for putting up with me though.

Where do I find information on how to upgrade to the new version ?

I can't find a readme file in the package, and can't find this information here

Enough to disable the product and install the new one ?

do I need to uninstall the product first before upgrading?

There is a PDF file included which holds all the help and news.

If you have installed the product, you already know how to upgrade: replace all files found in the upload folder and upgrade as any other product (import the product_rbs.xml file and enable upgrade). And yes, it may be a good idea to close a busy forum for a second :)

thank you y2ksw

Great add-on! Just a few things I need to learn. I can't seem to position the banner correctly as I was able to with using just HTML banners.

For example:

Put my image where I needed it in the "ad_global_header 2" template.

However I can't figure out how to ad padding while using "<!--@vbbanners:03@-->", any ideas? I need this add position in a particular spot in "header 2" to not interfere with the log-in area.

Can I use all kinds of sizes and formats for my banners? E.g. a square ad?

Did you try something like this?

I did, but it still rides to high in the section and interferes with the log-in. I need to be able to adjust the top and right side padding.

Hello friends.
A customer has complained that the statistics of Rotating Banner System and Gogle Analytics do not match.

The banner goes on ALL pages (impressions = 530.655) and Google Analytics says were visualized (142.962 pages).:confused:

Attach Photos. Can you help with the explanation?

Thanks

No idea if it's all related but maybe because Google does not have access to ALL pages, like PM's and member profiles where the banners are being displayed but not counted by google as google does not have access to those pages. Just a thought.:confused: And I'm sure pageviews and impressions are not related?

Thank you. I think in theory, pageviews and impressions are the same, but I hope they are not.

Anyone know if they are? Client pressures me :confused:

It depends on many things.

Basically, pageviews are how many times your pages are viewed. Any pages, with any content.

Impressions, from ad's point of view is how many time ad was showed on any of your pages.

So, it is really hard to tell if the two corresponds and how exactlly. You can have one ad showed on all of your pages two times. In that case, you'll have double impressions (for that ad) for pageviews. Or, ad could appear once in every ten pages, so you'll have 1/10 impressions for pageviews...