[Spinball]

Ok well first you have to have the news item in a static HTML format somewhere. Mine is on a different server altogether and is created with the same style as the forum.

The hack to vBulletin is based on an advert banner hack I got from here as discussed at:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=44204

An example of my banner displaying template:
-----------------------------------
<TABLE WIDTH="468" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" ALIGN="CENTER" BORDERCOLOR="#000000"><TR><TD><A HREF="http://www.avforums.com/perl_script_which_opens_advertisers site.pl" TARGET="_blank"><IMG SRC="http://www.avforums.com/advertisers_banner_graphic.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="60" BORDER="0" ALT="MovieTyme for import DVDs"></A></TD></TR></TABLE>
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The banner sits in the middle of the screen and when clicked fires off a perl script which just redirects people to the advertiser's site. I use this so I can count the number of clicks of the banner.

The forum display template has this in it:
----------------------------------------------
</table><br>
$mycustombanner
$forumdisplay[forumslist]
-------------------------------------
which displays the banner at the top of the thread list.
And then a simple hack of forumdisplay.php as follows:
-------------------------------------------------------------
if ($forumid==37) {
eval("\$mycustombanner .= \"".gettemplate('forum37advert')."\";");
$mycustombanner .= "<P></P>" . file_get_contents("http://www.url_of_your_news_headlines_static.html");
} elseif ($forumid==72) {
eval("\$mycustombanner .= \"".gettemplate('forum72advert')."\";");
} elseif ($forumid==80) {
$mycustombanner = file_get_contents("http://www.url_of_different_news_headlines_static.html") . "<P></P>";
} elseif ($forumid==82) {
if (mt_rand(1,2) == 1) {
eval("\$mycustombanner .= \"".gettemplate('forum82nexnix')."\";");
} else {
eval("\$mycustombanner .= \"".gettemplate('forum82avsales')."\";");
}
}
eval("dooutput(\"".gettemplate('forumdisplay')."\" );");
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The examples above display a banner and then news headlines for forum 37, a banner only for forum 72, news headlines only for forum 80 and a random banner from a pool of 2 banners for forum 82.


Hope this is useful to somebody.