[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by abqtj

I think I'm a little lost and have a few questions

-Do I put the <!--@vbbanners:0@--> code in the Advertising/Manage Ads part of the Admin CP?

-in the Rotating Banner System portion of the Admin CP, the URL field is the destination of when someone clicks a banner...and the Image/Flash is the actual URL of where the banner is hosted? Do I need to put the full url? Or if it's in, say, images/ads/SAMPLE.gif, is that enough?

-When I'm placing banners, if I want all of them in one location on my site, do I use Horizontal (0) for the upper right banner, above the navbar?

Thanks and sorry for the questions, I'm usually not this lost with mods. I like this one and it looks like most are having great success with it.

This mod allows you to show banners at a place you decide. The available "locations" 0 to 9 are merely intended as banner types, such as horizontal, vertical, square, flash, text, scripts or whatever you may need. Usually you will use at most 2 "locations" for all of your banners. On most of my sites, I use only 1 location.

You may put <!--@vbbanners:0@--> to <!--@vbbanners:9@--> literally everywhere in your styles. The plugin replaces these codes at the end of the page rendering process. If more codes of the same "location" are available, more banners of the same "location" are inserted from the database. However, the mod makes sure that on a single page, only one of the same banner appears. If there are more placeholders on a page than banners in the database, the rest of the banner locations are wiped.

If you use the banners only in your forum, you may use relative HTTP paths. However, on some systems or browsers it may not work, and in any case I'd suggest to use always full paths. File system paths are not considered valid (such as /var/www/htdocs/forum/banners/abc.gif or d:\vhosts\mysite.tld\httpdocs\forum\banners\abc.gi f).

You choose the physical banner location by adding a <!--@vbbanners:0@--> in the template you retain most useful for showing a banner. This mod has no "fixed location" injection system: it does not make changes to styles. It just replaces a placeholder.

In the options, you may change the placeholder. If you change it to, for example: @vbbanners:%d@, then you may add @vbbanners:0@ for a "location" 0 banner even in a normal message, signature or private message from the frontend (unless HTML is enabled in your forum sections). Together with other rules, your signature will then contain always the appropriate banner wherever you move, without having to setup specific rules in all the different places.

Most of the times, we think about how to give a signature, a message or a forum page a rule. With this mod, you set a banner rule instead. If I have a moderator who has a banner placeholder in their signature, they may show motorcycle banners in one place and software banners in another place, without having to worry about the placeholder - which always remains the same.

With this post I have tried to reformulate the help and to make a resume of all the FAQ of this thread. Unfortunately - in all these years - I haven't found yet an universally valid formula to explain how this mod works. But it does work and it does it well