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

[viper357]

How do I roll back to a previous version of RBS? My email notifications are not working at all now since the latest upgrade?

[Videx]

Originally Posted by rhender

I don't have a public_html folder...

Yes, one of my sites also lacks access to anything above public_html - very annoying when doing tasks like this. Not to mention disallowing you to easily store anything out of the public eye.

Not a big deal though - just go inside the upload folder, select all, then drop them on your /forum/ folder. If Filezilla really puts up a prompt for this instead of just merging automatically, then it must at least have an option to merge.

[rhender]

Cool. I'll try that. Thanks again Videx.

[rhender]

Yeah I don't think there is an option to merge.

It has just prompted me saying

"cpnav_rbs.xml" already exists in the "includes/xml/" folder. Do you want to overwrite it?

Is that ok to overwrite that one??


---...edit... that seems to be the only file that already existed on the server for some reason. ??

But everything else uploaded just fine, and merged into the existing folders admincp and includes... on the server.

So I think it's just fine. It's just that one file (cpnav_rbs.xml) that gave me a prompt to overwrite, and I said cancel... just in case...

Although it seems like it will be fine to overwrite now.


Another EDIT: I think everything uploaded fine. I had already uploaded that xml folder just to test it. On to the next step...

[rhender]

maybe someone can help viper357 now. sorry to get in the way.

[rhender]

Is there somewhere that describes the "positions" of the banner ads?

Like where "0" actually is, etc...

[Videx]

The positions are wherever you put them. I would suggest sticking with the default vb ad locations until you're more familiar and can go editing templates. AdminCP>Advertising>Manage ads - try one 'above footer' (<div style="text-align:center"><!--@vbbanners:0@--></div>).

Helping Viper with email problems is going to be trickier because it may be a problem with his server. And the email feature is new so not many are even trying to use it yet. By all means try testing it yourself with really short expiration times.

[rhender]

Ok, so I am obviously just beginning to figure this out... but what I am trying to do is have 2 static image ads in the header (plain old gifs). I already have one static ad in the header (since before installing this mod) but just got a new advertiser... so now I want them to alternate each time the page is refreshed. Install seems like it went perfectly BTW.

First, I'm wondering if this is even the right mod for what I want to do... I was told that it is by someone else. I still think it is the right one for me from what I can tell.

Right now I have the following code in the Ad HTML box in the "Header 1" ad location (my first ad that has been running since before installing this mod).

<a href="http://www.advertiser-site.com" target="_blank"><img src="advert-images/1st-company-ad.gif" title="company title" alt="company keywords etc." /></a>

Do I somehow add the following code to it, in order to have the rotating banners work?

<div style="text-align:center"><!--@vbbanners:0@--></div>

And then for the second ad, do I repeat the same process to have them alternate each time the page is refreshed? Sorry if I'm driving you nuts with simple questions.


ALSO, are there instructions somewhere for how to do all of this, that I am missing??? or am I supposed to just scour this extremely long thread for info on how to implement all of this??? I printed the PDF for rotating banner system, but none of this was in there I don't think....

[Videx]

No, you replace the ad code with the RBS tag "<!--@vbbanners:0@-->". You add the existing ad as a banner in RBS.

There's a tutorial video in the first post, but I think we really need a new one written for total noobs - starting with how to open the AdminCP, through FTP, to dealing with clients at renewal time. It's been so long for me I can't remember much about installing it.

[rhender]

Ok, awesome Videx. Thanks so much. Yes, a total noob instruction PDF or video would be fantastic... as without it, I feel kind of lost. Thanks again, hopefully I can get this going now.

EDIT: Sweet. I got it. I had to deselect an option in the forums that are able to view the ad. I had to command click to deselect so that it shows on all forums. YES!!!!!

Does the google ads thing pay money for clicks if I leave it up???

EDIT: Also, the google ad thing cycles through like 5 times before my first real advertiser displays. Is there a way to change that so I don't upset my advertisers?

Another EDIT: I added the 2nd advertiser to the ad manager, with the vbbanners code... and also added it to the mod's section with the html image... and it started to show up next to the first ad, in the header... ???? I had it listed as 2 in it's display order in the ad manager. Is that wrong? Do I need to change the vbbanners code to vbbanners:1 so that is next in the ad display?