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

[Antonio Pereira]

Its possible to use VBSEO - Clean HTML ?

Wen Clean HTML off is terrible for SEO.

Best Regards

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by Antonio Pereira

Its possible to use VBSEO - Clean HTML ?

Wen Clean HTML off is terrible for SEO.

No, that's incorrect. All "Clean HTML" does is remove white space from the code, which makes the code easier to read. Search engine spiders have no problem jumping over spaces and it isn't going to affect indexing or ranking on any search engine.

[Theda]

would this work for just the main logo banner at the top of forums? or is ad-specific?

[Antonio Pereira]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

No, that's incorrect. All "Clean HTML" does is remove white space from the code, which makes the code easier to read. Search engine spiders have no problem jumping over spaces and it isn't going to affect indexing or ranking on any search engine.

Cleanup HTML code?

Select 'Yes' to remove unnecessary whitespace characters and HTML comments from the source code of your forum pages.
This increases the C2C (Content to Code) ratio and reduces page sizes, resulting in a net performance increase and reduction in bandwidth required.

So you are tell-me increasing C2C is not important to google

Best Regards

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by Antonio Pereira

So you are tell-me increasing C2C is not important to google

Yes, that's what I'm telling you. The effect of applying that is negligible at best.

[dweber]

I would like to add a place holder into a static HTML Widget box on the "Front Page" but am a newbie.

Could anyone give me a sample line of HTML code to insert the placeholder (@vbanners@) into?

Thanks in advance.

[mobe00]

is it possible to add the options to change the wmode parameters in flash banners <param name="wmode" value="opaque" />

If i add an flash banner with rotating banner system the flash will lay over the vbulletin drop down menus etc. See the attached picture. I had to use the built in ad management in vbulletin and add the flash code manually to get it working correctly.

this is the flash code that displays it correctly

<div>
			<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="728" height="90" id="myFlashContent">
				<param name="movie" value="banner.swf" />
				<param name="wmode" value="opaque" />
				<!--[if !IE]>-->
				<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.mydomain.com/images/ads/banner.swf" width="720" height="240">
					<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
				</object>
			</object>
		</div>

Edit: wrong wmode on the attached picture..it should be opaque and not transparent

[TruthElixirX]

Originally Posted by TruthElixirX

For some reason when I use the click tracking function, it does not count clicks from banners on vBadvanced pages. Any ideas? It works everywhere else.

Any body?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by mobe00

is it possible to add the options to change the wmode parameters in flash banners <param name="wmode" value="opaque" />

If i add an flash banner with rotating banner system the flash will lay over the vbulletin drop down menus etc. See the attached picture. I had to use the built in ad management in vbulletin and add the flash code manually to get it working correctly.

this is the flash code that displays it correctly

<div>
            <object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="728" height="90" id="myFlashContent">
                <param name="movie" value="banner.swf" />
                <param name="wmode" value="opaque" />
                <!--[if !IE]>-->
                <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.mydomain.com/images/ads/banner.swf" width="720" height="240">
                    <param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
                </object>
            </object>
        </div>

Edit: wrong wmode on the attached picture..it should be opaque and not transparent

I'm sorry, I can't fix problems with the embedded flash. My flash wrapper embeds arbitrary flash images in order to allow to change the destination URL and eventually enable click tracking. If this doesn't work for you, you still can use your code inside a rotating banner in the Text field, but also would habe to code the flash accordingly to point or to the click tracker, or to your final URL.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by TruthElixirX

Any body?

At line 57 in rbs_banner.php, you may comment out the if statement. In this case, the referers are not checked against the forum URL, and clicks should be counted. However, this opens a door to click fraud.