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

Grazzie Mille Giovanni for the great help you provide.

As placing a no follow before the banners is not an option within the vbulletin mod, I tried to follow up the example given by Maru up here and place the nofollow tag manually to the XML file and reupload it and, allow overwrite on import product.

YET, when I check the file provided by Maru, it only has two occurences of nofollow, on lines 279 and 284, as here below

                $output = substr($output, 0, $npos) . "<a href=\"$bburl/rbs_banner.php?id=$rs[id]\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"$rbs_target\"><img src=\"$image\" border=\"0\" alt=\"$name\" /></a>" . substr($output, $npos + $len);
            }
            else
            {
                $url = rbs_url_sanity($rs['url']);
                $output = substr($output, 0, $npos) . "<a href=\"$url\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"$rbs_target\"><img src=\"$image\" border=\"0\" alt=\"$name\" /></a>" . substr($output, $npos + $len);

I searched the most up to date version of rbs for any nofollow, and could not find them. This means you did not adopt the nofollow hardcoded

While this is good, the option is still not there.

I would like to place nofollow before links, where should I do that in the last rbs?

I have added this request to the todo list now

[webmaster74]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

I have added this request to the todo list now

Grazzie caro Giovanni

[jsmithmms]

Upon trying to install the product, I'm getting the following error:

"Please upload the files that came with the product before installing or upgrading!

Missing files:"

I've triple-checked, all the files have been uploaded and seem to be in the correct location. Anything else I should try?

It looks like everything's installed on our server at Public_HTML/Forums, but I've tried the root folder public_html and forums with the uploads and it's still not installing, and the error message shows no missing files.

[y2ksw]

Most probably it's the file permissions. Normally, Ftp will upload with the same owner as the web server and chmod 644, but a few servers use actually a different setting. Those files then cannot read or only partially ... such as file listings are ok, but not php script execution.

[jsmithmms]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Most probably it's the file permissions. Normally, Ftp will upload with the same owner as the web server and chmod 644, but a few servers use actually a different setting. Those files then cannot read or only partially ... such as file listings are ok, but not php script execution.

Thanks for that suggestion! I went into the FTP server and changed the file permissions, but am still receiving the same error.

Here's what I've got them set to:



Tried it with the install both directly in public_html and under our forums section, which is where I believe everything else is installed.

[Gripi]

Hope in next version, you can add the reset "counter statistic" for specific banner.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Gripi

Hope in next version, you can add the reset "counter statistic" for specific banner.

You can do this easily by using a couple of queries:

DELETE FROM rbs_hits WHERE bannerid=N;
UPDATE rbs_banners SET impressions=0, clicks=0 WHERE id=N;

where N is the banner ID you want to clean out.

[rootsxrocks]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Most probably it's the file permissions. Normally, Ftp will upload with the same owner as the web server and chmod 644, but a few servers use actually a different setting. Those files then cannot read or only partially ... such as file listings are ok, but not php script execution.

When I unpacked the upgrade into a folder on the server and then moved it in to replace the admincp it changed the permissions on the folder admincp and includes to 700 and locked me out of the control panel , it was an easy fix by changing the permissions back to 755 but I have never had that happen using the same method with other plug ins and upgrades.

[rootsxrocks]

Now about that Flash.
I am not able to make one work proper either. I simply wanted to try it out with a flash file I found from another user.
after trying a few combinations I am able to get it to partially appear but it is not interactive nor does not scale like it would if you go directly to it.
this is a direct link to the flash http://crackercoast.com/crackerchat/banners/banner.swf

[rootsxrocks]

Originally Posted by jsmithmms

Thanks for that suggestion! I went into the FTP server and changed the file permissions, but am still receiving the same error.

Here's what I've got them set to:



Tried it with the install both directly in public_html and under our forums section, which is where I believe everything else is installed.

check that the folders permissions have not changed.