Miscellaneous Hacks - Rotating Banner System

With the Rotating Banner System software, you may publish literally anywhere standard banners and advertising, with no restriction but your imagination. Unlike many other products, it allows to show an unlimited amount of banners and advertising, which are randomly shown at the places you choose, and you may refer generically to an Ad by using specific placeholders.

Also the management is straight-forward and simple to use. Forum administrators with maintenance rights may add, edit and delete records from the Administration Control Panel (ACP), one of each representing a banner. After saving the new banner settings, they are immediately visible at your board.

Compatibility: from vBulletin 3.6.5 onwards

By the way, I do also install the hack on your boards, but since I am very, very busy, it may take some time (weeks) until it gets done.


Tutorials:

• How-to create my first banner (Flash).

Updates:

• 2.0.1: Simple click tracker added, HTML help included.
• 2.0.3: Small bug fixes; additional banner list, navigation bar, E-Mail field for banner event notifications and automatic save on scroll setting; absolute URL to rbs_banner.php in order to allow click tracking on non-standard pages; supported languages: English, Italian; Help file clean-up.
• 2.0.5: Small bug fixes; additional details in banner list; email notification for epired banners.
• 2.0.6: vbCMS compatibility bug fix; additional banner lists.
• 2.0.7: Usergroups filter: now it is possible to define a list of usergroups which may show a banner; additional vbCMS compatibility bug fix.
• 2.0.8: Various fixes and most of all, inclusion of the right files: admin_rbs.php, cpnav_rbs.xml
• 2.0.9: Extra comma fix in new record creation.
• 2.1.0: Fix for an occasional banner type selection bug, when the sample banners have been deleted or disabled.
• 2.2.0 (Major upgrade): Up to 10 different banner locations. Requires changes to your existing placeholders in your templates, since a more generic format has been chosen. If you don't need more than 2 different locations, you don't need to upgrade. Changed files: rbs_banner.php, admin_rbs.php
• 2.2.1: Minor bug fix in files: admin_rbs_h_banner_list.php, admin_rbs_v_banner_list.php
• 2.2.1: Hotfix for Max Clicks saving bug.
• 2.2.2: More listings and less files. PDF Help. Separate Italian add-ons and help. Duplicate button.
• 2.2.3: Minor bug fixes. Changed files: product-rbs.xml
• 2.2.4: Flash Banner support (beta). Changed files: product-rbs.xml, rbs_wrapper.swf, admin_rbs.php, English Help.
• 2.2.5: Hotfix for vBulletin 4.0.2 compatibility bug.
• 2.2.6: Checking for installed Flash Wrapper rbs_wrapper.swf; A few English FAQ; Help files. Changed files: product-rbs.xml
• 2.3.0 (Major upgrade): New modules: Delete Expired Banners, Disable Expired Banners; Detail Banner Statistics with unique access key for your customers; Updated help; Changed files: all.
• 2.3.1: Hotfix for missing field in rbs_hist table. Changed files: none, just update product.
• 2.3.2: Added: Unsupported option for setting any number of available positions between 1 and big bang. Fixed: Small bug and speed issues. Removed: Italian translation. Italians may now request support at www.vbulletin.it. Changed files: admin_rbs.php.
• 2.3.3: Fix: Copy selected forum ID's during banner duplication. Changed: start and end hours for new banners are set to 0:00 and 23:59 respectively. Changed files: admin_rbs.php.
• 2.3.4: Option: Send Mail Before. This option allows to schedule expiring banners differently. New variables for emails: $rbs_enddate: This variable holds the formatted banner ending date and time based on the standard formats for date and time in vBulletin settings; $rbs_name: This variable holds the banner name. EMail Notifications option description: Added direct links to the email phrases for quick changes. Changed files: rbs_mail_cron.php.
• 2.4.0 (Major upgrade): Removed: Option to enable or disable mailing. Banners with email addresses to notify are handled. Setting to reset mailing in single banners. Now, if mailing should be repeated, you will have to edit the banner from phpMyAdmin. Added: Order links in lists. The initial state is ordered by ID, as before. By clicking the titles, the other voices can be ordered. Clicking twice inverts the order. This works in all lists. Options to prevent counting and reducing thus a tiny bit of load. A new bunch of demo banners for new installations. Demo banners are locked into database in order to avoid 30% of the questions because of the 'experts' deleting them before trying the product. They can be disabled and modified though. The true experts can delete them after all testing from the database by using phpMyAdmin without side effects. Changes: Phrase for emailing about expiring banners, now also with direct links to the phrases. Demo banners. Our old publisher ID is replaced with the new ones, and old demo banners are updated with the new ones, if found. The functions have been exported to includes/functions_rbs.php. This makes the product code smaller and easier to maintain, and runs faster on sites where caching/acceleration is enabled. Changed Files: all *.php
• 2.4.1: Option Likelihood. This new option adds a weight to banners and allows thus to show one banner more often than another. The default weight is 100%. We also make sure that the final date of the default banners falls into a valid range. Changed files: includes/functions_rbs.php and rbs_stats.php.
• 2.4.2: Workaround for update sequence problems.

Hacks and unsupported add-ons:

• Banner Rotator Widget To CMS
• Rotate banners in-place
• Italian Translation

[JWL]

Doesnt work with VBadvanced

[mikeinjersey]

how many different Ad locations are possible with this hack ? From the description it makes it seem like only 1 or 2 positions are available..

[onehost]

y2,

I have not really looked over your banner hack, but would you say it is
better then digitpoints hack? also, can ads also show up in blog posts?

This also looks a little complicated to install...I also see that you install
the hack on forums, is there a fee for you to do this? More then likely
I will have you do this as I do not know how to setup the placeholders
that are required for the banners to run, and I have a couple of themes
that may need to be modified in order for you to do this....

Can someone post their forum that is using this mod? Would like to
see this in action on a forum already using the mod.

Thank-You Sir,

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by mikeinjersey

how many different Ad locations are possible with this hack ? From the description it makes it seem like only 1 or 2 positions are available..

Normally, you would use 1 placeholder for any kind of banner in your pages. This gives you any imaginable number of locations.

The positions 0...9 are merely types of banners, such as horizontal and vertical, although this is not entirely true. It is up to you how to use locations, my tip is to use as little as possible - most of the times, position 0 is just fine, for 1 or 100 banners on your page

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by onehost

y2,

I have not really looked over your banner hack, but would you say it is
better then digitpoints hack? also, can ads also show up in blog posts?

This also looks a little complicated to install...I also see that you install
the hack on forums, is there a fee for you to do this? More then likely
I will have you do this as I do not know how to setup the placeholders
that are required for the banners to run, and I have a couple of themes
that may need to be modified in order for you to do this....

Can someone post their forum that is using this mod? Would like to
see this in action on a forum already using the mod.

Thank-You Sir,

I can't tell if it is better as anything else, but I have tried a lot of banner software before making my own. Currently, it is the most flexible banner tool for vBulletin, which I have come across.

The installation is as simple as any other product which has additional files, it needs FTP and basic knowledge of installing products.

Just follow the Flash help to get one banner running. Once you mastered that, you will discover the ease of adding more banners to your forums ... just insist and don't give up

Here is one site it uses it.

[oddmud]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Here, as an unofficial addon, you get the autorefreshing page (tested). It needs:

- a text editor;
- a refresh time of your choice (see metatag refresh in file, now at 10 seconds);
- a banner location (see placeholder in file, now at position 0);
- at least a banner for that location;
- a global target of a new page aka _blank (RBS options), else you jump into the iframe;
- a template modification for a 468x60 banner:

<iframe src="rbs_iframe.php" align="center" frameborder="0" height="60" width="468" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Please note: with smaller banners you get white borders, with larger than the iframe area, they are clipped.

This works all fine and dandy, except it adds the tweetboard in to the frame, and it looks rather silly. Any way to fix this? Are you planning on adding this in to the future releases? options for auto-rotation instead of just refresh rotation?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by oddmud

This works all fine and dandy, except it adds the tweetboard in to the frame, and it looks rather silly. Any way to fix this? Are you planning on adding this in to the future releases? options for auto-rotation instead of just refresh rotation?

You will have to adapt the iframe dimensions in order to make it look like it should.

I do not plan to add this to the product, since pages are usually shown from a few seconds to at most a few minutes, and in-place rotating does make no sense. Based on a 1 million page hit history at a commercial site with forums, only a very few pages (1...5) are shown more than 2 minutes. Also it would require me to respond to even more HTML questions which I am unable to answer.

There are no other options to rotate a banner efficiently in-place. You may look for Javascript, but then you will have to handle all devices which have no Java enabled with Content-Refresh anyways.

Have a nice weekend and a happy new year ... I'm off for a few days

[onehost]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

I can't tell if it is better as anything else, but I have tried a lot of banner software before making my own. Currently, it is the most flexible banner tool for vBulletin, which I have come across.

The installation is as simple as any other product which has additional files, it needs FTP and basic knowledge of installing products.

Just follow the Flash help to get one banner running. Once you mastered that, you will discover the ease of adding more banners to your forums ... just insist and don't give up

Here is one site it uses it.

That looks like a very simple rotation...but I would like to place banners in
certairn areas of the forum, not just at the top, how about placement?
does this mod have any payment options or is it all manual? auto pay, auto show?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by onehost

That looks like a very simple rotation...but I would like to place banners in
certairn areas of the forum, not just at the top, how about placement?
does this mod have any payment options or is it all manual? auto pay, auto show?

It is a simple rotation ... the complexity depends on your settings, and same are the locations in your styles. You may overfill the pages or leave them bland, as you wish. The number of entries in the database and the number of placeholders in your styles define where to show how many different banners. By the way, it is a good idea to install it on a test board and just try. It is much easier to use than to describe.

And no, there is no auto-magic. You handle it all

[oddmud]

I listened to you, and removed the auto-rotation. I love your mod, the tracking is awesome.