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

[TransAmDan]

Great mod, its working well, and simple to use.

I have a couple of ideas for additions if you were thinking of adding anything.

1. The banners I sell get paid for 1 year in advance, I have an excel spreadsheet to tell me when they expire. I know your mod lets me know when the expire, but would be nice to know 1 week in advance so I can contact the payers just before it expires. So perhaps an addition of a date on when to send the alert email out just before the banner expires.

2. I have a section on the right hand side for small adverts, almost like text links. I have multiple ones in this area, all expiring at different times. If I have 3 banners areas on the rest of the page, I may need more than 7 cells for the right hand side text links. If I put them into one cell eg. <!--@vbbanners:2@--> then all these text links will rotate, showing one at a time. Perhaps have an option to show multiple adverts in one cell.


Great mod, and keep up the good work

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by TransAmDan

Great mod, its working well, and simple to use.

I have a couple of ideas for additions if you were thinking of adding anything.

1. The banners I sell get paid for 1 year in advance, I have an excel spreadsheet to tell me when they expire. I know your mod lets me know when the expire, but would be nice to know 1 week in advance so I can contact the payers just before it expires. So perhaps an addition of a date on when to send the alert email out just before the banner expires.

2. I have a section on the right hand side for small adverts, almost like text links. I have multiple ones in this area, all expiring at different times. If I have 3 banners areas on the rest of the page, I may need more than 7 cells for the right hand side text links. If I put them into one cell eg. <!--@vbbanners:2@--> then all these text links will rotate, showing one at a time. Perhaps have an option to show multiple adverts in one cell.


Great mod, and keep up the good work

Please use just multiple <!--@vbbanners:2@--> one below each other in order to show more single banners of that group. No banner will show up more than once on a single page, but if you have more instances of the same placeholder, as many banners as may fit are filled from the database

[TransAmDan]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Please use just multiple <!--@vbbanners:2@--> one below each other in order to show more single banners of that group. No banner will show up more than once on a single page, but if you have more instances of the same placeholder, as many banners as may fit are filled from the database

Brilliant, Thanks for the tip. It worked wonders.

[Videx]

Originally Posted by TransAmDan

So perhaps an addition of a date on when to send the alert email out just before the banner expires.

Agree. We use a separate Sponsors Calendar and I get a reminder emailed a few days in advance. I was hoping to be able to use this mod to take over that task. But if the banner stops running at the same time the reminder goes out then that's kind of useless.

"Send expiration email x days in advance" would be a nice option. Or just automatically send them out 3-7 days prior.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Videx

Agree. We use a separate Sponsors Calendar and I get a reminder emailed a few days in advance. I was hoping to be able to use this mod to take over that task. But if the banner stops running at the same time the reminder goes out then that's kind of useless.

"Send expiration email x days in advance" would be a nice option. Or just automatically send them out 3-7 days prior.

You may change the line 31 in rbs_mail_cron.php from:

AND enddate<" . TIMENOW;

to

AND enddate<" . (TIMENOW - 86400 * N);

where N is the number of days you wish to be advised before.

I'm not sure if I will implement this feature.

[Kolbi]

Is it possible that your addon causes xhtml validation issues if no usergroup is set, if it is allowed to see the banner?

Then

&userid=0

is added to the links?
Please change the

&

to

&

to get valid code

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Kolbi

Is it possible that your addon causes xhtml validation issues if no usergroup is set, if it is allowed to see the banner?

Then is added to the links?
Please change the

&

to

&

to get valid code

I have already answered this question: the & amp ; version is not always interpreted correctly by web servers, while the & version always works. I prefer to have a working link over a potentially not working, but HTML compatible one.

If this is an issue for you, you may change the code accordingly for your server.

When Apache will ever arrive to 3.x and HTML 4.x, or whatever will come, will be a de facto standard for all producers in the same manner (no exceptions made), I probably will follow the standards

[Maxi62]

hello
How can I insert advertising in the first post of a thread. Does it somehow not quite.
I use vb 4.12, as I would have to change because that template?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Maxi62

hello
How can I insert advertising in the first post of a thread. Does it somehow not quite.
I use vb 4.12, as I would have to change because that template?

I believe there is a template for that, but I can't rememebr its name ...

[Maxi62]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

I believe there is a template for that, but I can't rememebr its name ...

Yes give it to t while the following template:

ad_showthread_firstpost

But there is a problem with that. It only works if one integrates xxxx ad_thread_first_post_content in the div block.

This works not, It appears no ads:

ad_showthread_firstpost:

<!--@vbbanners:6@-->

This works partly:

ad_showthread_firstpost:

<div id="ad_thread_first_post_content">
<!--@vbbanners:6@-->
</div>

If banners are to be displayed only in certain user groups with Dialog-Options in Rotating Banner System , then won in the first post for all user groups place. So then you have a large gap in the post even though no ads will appear.

How can you prevent it?


And yet another suggestion:
Can not you install, which must be sent a monthly status e-mail with the number of visits, that would be great!