Major Additions - vB Ad Management 4

vB Ad Management 4

Check the FAQ before requesting support!

What does it do?

Features include global settings, advertisements allowing template conditionals, ad sharing and ad revenue sharing, timed advertisements, preset popular ad locations and functions such as sponsors, additional custom ad locations, random and static advertisements and its all very easy to use. You can use it for ordinary ads like adsense, banner rotations, or any content at all as well as using it to manage ads outside your forum too.

You can read in more detail about these and other features in the manual, which also contains some helpful notes and instructions, as well as the installation and upgrade instructions



If you are using autoinsertion and were using vB Ad Management before version 4.00, you will need to remove your old template edits or advertisements will appear multiple times. Just reverse the old instructions below.

* Find <!-- post $post[postid] popup menu --> and paste $postbit_advertisement above it in your postbit & postbit_legacy templates.
* Paste $forumbit_advertisement at the bottom of your forumhome_forumbit_level1_post and forumhome_forumbit_level2_post templates.
* Paste $threadbit_advertisement at the bottom of your threadbit template.
* Paste $footer_advertisement at the top of your footer template.
* Find $spacer_close in your footer template and below it paste $rightcolumn_advertisement.
* Find &nbsp; in your header template and replace it with $header_advertisement.
* Find $spacer_open in your header template and below it paste $leftcolumn_advertisement.

[RedTyger]

All the instructions are there I'm afraid, and I must admit they're rather weak. I am trying to make an effort for things to be clearer in the next version for that reason as well as the facts that the next version is more complicated in some ways. It's very user-friendly once you have a handle on how it works, but baffling when you don't.

If you need any general help, just post here.

Edit: Didn't notice you kind offer, I may ask for some feedback from everyone in that area at some point. For now, I'm making lots of changes so it's not really possible.

[grahamsmythe]

Originally Posted by RedTyger

It's very user-friendly once you have a handle on how it works, but baffling when you don't.

If you need any general help, just post here.

Thanks for coming back to me RedTyger

Let's start with what we want to do - perhaps once I've got an idea of how to do that, the rest will fall into place.

I have a banner to size 234 x 60 that I'd love to put on the header of our forum. The file I have is a JPG. How do I insert that?

Graham

[MomentumInc]

I'm sorry if this has been asked before, but there are 90 pages to go through and I didn't find anything with a quick search.

Is there an easy way to use this plugin to put different ads on each forum (based on forum id)? Right now, we have this plugin installed on several sites, but still have to resort to putting a long list of conditionals in the templates in order to put specific ads on specific forums.

I know about the feature to only put ads on certain forums, but we need ads on every forum... just different code for each.

Thanks.

[RedTyger]

Originally Posted by grahamsmythe

Thanks for coming back to me RedTyger

Let's start with what we want to do - perhaps once I've got an idea of how to do that, the rest will fall into place.

I have a banner to size 234 x 60 that I'd love to put on the header of our forum. The file I have is a JPG. How do I insert that?

Graham

Ah. That's really beyond the scope of a manual for this modification, that's general internetness.

<a href="LINK" /><img src="IMGLINK" alt="IMGDESCRIPTION" /></a>

LINK = Where you want to send people who click on the banner.
IMGLINK = Where the location of the image is.
IMGDESCRIPTION = A description of what the image is.

Put that in the header adcode section of the options, and ensure that it's enabled just above that. In general settings, the default is set to show advertisements to administrators only for testing (it says 6 in the usergroup settings, which is admin's usergroup id) so when you're ready you will have to adjust the numbers listed in that setting.

Originally Posted by MomentumInc

I'm sorry if this has been asked before, but there are 90 pages to go through and I didn't find anything with a quick search.

Is there an easy way to use this plugin to put different ads on each forum (based on forum id)? Right now, we have this plugin installed on several sites, but still have to resort to putting a long list of conditionals in the templates in order to put specific ads on specific forums.

I know about the feature to only put ads on certain forums, but we need ads on every forum... just different code for each.

Thanks.

Currently, no. Next version, almost certainly. But it will still be a long list of conditionals, there's really no other way to do it.

[grahamsmythe]

Wow! I didn't in my wildest dreams ever think it would be that easy!

I thought I'd have to get into changing lots more code and other techincal stuff, but all it took was a bit of html - thanks for that, but I could have done that on my own if I'd have known it was so easy!

I've got my advertising up there now. As and when I get some takers - maximum of four I hope, I'll send you a donation for using the mod. It's fantastic

Regards

Graham

PS - Have a look at my site http://www.vincentownersclub.co.uk/

Any idea how I can get the banner to move up a bit, so that it's centered?

[mightyb]

Im a bit concerned about security issue. I want to allow my members to display their own adcode. How can i make sure they only use adsense, clicksor or any other trusted code rather than something malicious. Thanks a lot!

[RedTyger]

Originally Posted by grahamsmythe

Wow! I didn't in my wildest dreams ever think it would be that easy!

I thought I'd have to get into changing lots more code and other techincal stuff, but all it took was a bit of html - thanks for that, but I could have done that on my own if I'd have known it was so easy!

I've got my advertising up there now. As and when I get some takers - maximum of four I hope, I'll send you a donation for using the mod. It's fantastic

Regards

Graham

PS - Have a look at my site http://www.vincentownersclub.co.uk/

Any idea how I can get the banner to move up a bit, so that it's centered?

No worries! Open your header template, find:

<td>
        &nbsp; (or it may be $header_advertisement now, I guess)
</td>

Replace with:

<td style="vertical-align:middle">
        &nbsp;
</td>

If you can't find the code you're supposed to find, you just have to add style="vertical-align:middle" to the <td> which holds the advertisement, whichever that may be.

Edit: And remove all those keywords from the bottom of your front page, Google will flay you alive for that! Sites have been banned for less.

Originally Posted by mightyb

Im a bit concerned about security issue. I want to allow my members to display their own adcode. How can i make sure they only use adsense, clicksor or any other trusted code rather than something malicious. Thanks a lot!

When creating a custom field, vBulletin provides an option called RegEx which you can apply to that field. Regex is an extremely powerful and extremely complicated, alas, way of limiting what is added to that field. So powerful that you can specify what characters are allowed, how many, in what order...more or less anything to be as limiting as you like. The more specific you are, the more secure you will be and it goes without saying don't use the allow HTML option.

If you can post examples of what code you would like people to be able to post, when I get a minute I'll see if I can come up with a RegEx code for you. Adsense is comparatively easy, others might not be.

[Tiberonmagnus]

I hope someone can help me solve this issue. I'm getting

Warning: explode() [function.explode]: Empty delimiter. in /includes/vb_ad_management/postbit_display_start.php on line 72

Each time I try viewing a thread from the front page (using vbadvanced) and also while inside the forum. It appears to give me a warning message for each post. My site is at www.sitefaust.com. If someone can give me a hand that would be great. It's probably something really simple too, I'm just not seeing it.



Edit: It appears to only do it when I enable "Display advertisement after first post on a page?". Hmmmm


Edit2: Ok, I fixed it.. I was just missing a "," lol

[mightyb]

Originally Posted by RedTyger

When creating a custom field, vBulletin provides an option called RegEx which you can apply to that field. Regex is an extremely powerful and extremely complicated, alas, way of limiting what is added to that field. So powerful that you can specify what characters are allowed, how many, in what order...more or less anything to be as limiting as you like. The more specific you are, the more secure you will be and it goes without saying don't use the allow HTML option.

If you can post examples of what code you would like people to be able to post, when I get a minute I'll see if I can come up with a RegEx code for you. Adsense is comparatively easy, others might not be.

I just had a look at a few codes and they look quite complected. Partly because you can not determine what format these are in by looking at the code as it looks to be dynamic. I don't quite fancy my members using huge banners etc...

Can i just have it accept adsense and 368x60 banners with affiliate links and nothing else? Thanks a lot!


-edit-

I tried installing this and i get a blank code for #shared#. Everything seems to work fine but when put #shared# in my ad code all i get is: Forum sponsors:

The rest is blank I will give it another try tomorrow morning.

[RedTyger]

Originally Posted by mightyb

I just had a look at a few codes and they look quite complected. Partly because you can not determine what format these are in by looking at the code as it looks to be dynamic. I don't quite fancy my members using huge banners etc...

Can i just have it accept adsense and 368x60 banners with affiliate links and nothing else? Thanks a lot!

You can never determine how big an image will be, but you can put height="368" width="60" in your image code to force anything they put to be that size. As I said, anything is possible but that would be a super-complicated regex if you wanted either/or and it's not something I have time to work out at the moment I'm afraid.

The Adsense alone regular expression is quite simple (based on my own adsense id, you may need to adjust it), use this:
^ca-pub-[0-9]{16}$

That says the custom field must be ca-pub- then sixteen numbers between 0 and 9. No more, no less. Change {16} to {15-17} to allow 15 to 17 numbers, and so on.