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

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by webmaster74

is this mod still supported?

yes. time permitted

[leitel]

Hello, I have integrated questions2answers with vBulletin at http://www.noblood.org/answers/.

Although I realize Rotating Banner System is designed to run with vB, I am thinking that I can possibly call this mod from q2a. I have already implemented common user login with vB.

I can fish through the RBS code see how/where to wire it up with q2a.

Anyone else gone down this road?

Thank you

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by leitel

Hello, I have integrated questions2answers with vBulletin at http://www.noblood.org/answers/.

Although I realize Rotating Banner System is designed to run with vB, I am thinking that I can possibly call this mod from q2a. I have already implemented common user login with vB.

I can fish through the RBS code see how/where to wire it up with q2a.

Anyone else gone down this road?

Thank you

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...08#post2125608

Somewhere near to this post this argument was discussed extensively

[BadgerDog]

2.4.0 update installed with thanks....

Regards,
Doug

[y2ksw]

Sorry it took so long, but getting a new Google Publisher ID was much more time consuming than expected, and after that I had no time

[addamroy]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

You may insert into your text banner the click tracker and refer to the banner id itself. We have talked about it several times here in this thread, last time not too long ago.

I went back 5 pages and couldn't find any instructions on how to do this, not looking forward to going through all 100+ of them.

Maybe add a note in the instructions or in the thread somewhere ?

I did try using just the standard URL with the bannerid in the ad and not the userid and it didn't result in any clicks being tracked. id forumname.com/rbs_banners.php?id=11 will redirect to the proper URL but no clicks are tracked.

Edit - I just found out that clicks don't track if you go straight to the URL in your browser, you have to physically click the link shown via rbs lol, thanks. I was testing it by just pasting the URL with the banner ID into my browser and no clicks were showing :/

So will this still work if we change the name of the rbs_banner.php file? Just so I can have a pretty URL at the bottom.

So the links might show something like myforum.com/goodstuff.php?id=26 as the URL instead of myforum.com/rbs_banner.php

[webmaster74]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

The outgoing link is just voting that link.

The page from where you advertise from (originator) will loose a little of ranking, but you would loose it with any kind of link, internal or external. However, since ranking has changed, you should concern more about information. Now, good information adds way more rank, than a number or less of links to another site subtracts from.

Ciao y2ksw,

Grazzie Mille for your very kind answers to djbaxter's post and mines. I highly appreciate your feedback and stand corrected.

I can't thank you enough for this great add-on. I believe vbulletin should pay you and adopt it in their core code.

[addamroy]

Just to clarify, you guys are all wrong about the pagerank thing.

If you understood what pagerank actually 'is', you'd have a better understanding of how to properly use nofollow.

Page rank is by definition, simply put, a calculation of the likelihood that a person entering the internet randomly clicking on links will land on any particular site.

The higher the chances of a person entering the internet randomly clicking links will land on your site, the higher your page rank. Go read up on it, go to wikipedia first, if you're unsure of my validity.

Think about it like this, facebook.

The chances of a person entering the internet randomly clicking links landing on facebook is extremly high if not almost guaranteed, which is why facebook has a pagerank of 9 or 10. Same with wikipedia, amazon, ebay, twitter, etc.

A link from pages with high page rank on these sites increases your pagerank because, again simply put, the chances of a person landing on the page your link is on is pretty high, thus making the chances of a user landing on your site higher, thus increasing your page rank.

This is why blasting out hundreds or thousands of those crap forum profile links does not mean you'll necessarily get ANY page rank, because chances are slim to none a person entering the internet randomly clicking links will ever land on your forum profile, therefore passing virtually ZERO pagerank.

So, understanding what pagerank IS... you will not LOSE pagerank by placing external links on your site (this does not decrease the chances of a person landing on your site), however you will PASS pagerank via the links on your site.

Pagerank is distributed EVENLY throughout all DOFOLLOW links on a page, once again simply put, all nofollow does is disallow the passage of pagerank to that site. NOFOLLOW tags eliminate that link from Google's 'graph of the web' thus eliminating it from their calculations when determining the 'chances a user entering the internet randomly clicking on links' will land on your site.

If you put nofollow tags on all the external RBS links, the only upside for YOU is you're distributing a little more pagerank throughout your own site from the page the link is on.

In my opinion, depending on how many external links you have in the first place, I honestly wouldn't worry about it.

[webmaster74]

Originally Posted by addamroy

If you put nofollow tags on all the external RBS links, the only upside for YOU is you're distributing less pagerank throughout your own site from the page the link is on.

thank you addamroy,
exactly, I don't want to distribute / pass my pagerank throughout my site to my advertisers.

[Alan_SP]

Originally Posted by addamroy

So, understanding what pagerank IS... you will not LOSE pagerank by placing external links on your site (this does not decrease the chances of a person landing on your site), however you will PASS pagerank via the links on your site.

Excellent post and very well written. :up:

I agree, page rank in a way isn't important, it is important that we create good content, page rank comes after that. Of course, vBSEO helps a lot, but the most important thing is content, we need to have content that people want and that gives us good PR. PR is measure of success we already achieved, not the measure of success we will achieve in distant (or not so distant) future.