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

[djbaxter]

1. This add-on works for me with 4.06.

2. Since 4.04 , you can do insert the appropriate placeholder for this add-on into an appropriate location in postbit, similar to the instructuions given in the second link provided:

In the postbit template (or I guess postbit_legacy if that's what you're using), FIND at the end of the template:

{vb:raw template_hook.postbit_end}

ADD BEFORE:

<!-- ad after first post -->
<vb:if condition="$post['isfirstshown']">
<div align="center" style="padding: 10px;">
<!--@vbbanners:0@-->
<br/> 
</div>
</vb:if>
<!-- end ad after first post -->

Change "<!--@vbbanners:0@-->" to the appropriate placeholder for your banners.

How do I get the banners to show? I am using 4.0.1 and nothing shows up no matter what position i put my banners...

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by atlemacks

How do I get the banners to show? I am using 4.0.1 and nothing shows up no matter what position i put my banners...

If you're using vBSEO, turn off "remove white space" as an option.

Check View Source from your browser on a page where you should be seeing the ad. Do you see a placeholder something like <!--@vbbanners:0@--> anywhere on the page?

[inigo]

I need more than 10 different banner locations, can be done?

[djbaxter]

Why on earth do you need more than 10 locations? You do realize you can put more than one banner per location, right? And that you can add the placeholder for one "ad location" to more than one template?

In real;ity, all you really need is one for each size banner you're using, e.g., vertical, small banner, sqaure, rectangle, etc.

[inigo]

Sorry for my english, I´ll try to explain my project, and why I think I need more locations.

I have 50 forum ids in my forum. I want to put different banners in each forum, so I think I need 50 different banner locations, didn´t I?

In each forum for example 6 banners, with the same banner code, but one banner code for each forum id, because in forum Id=1 it will be 6 banners showing (and 15 banner possibilities for example in that banner code), but in forum id=2 it will be other 6 banners (of 12 possibilities for example, but different than the 15 previous ones, so i´ll nedd other banner code),... and all the same for the 50 forum ids.

apart of this i`ll need other

So I need for example 50 banner locations for the forums, and about 10 more locations (for photo gallery, news peage cms, downloads, ...). So i´ll like about 75 different locations if it´s possible, or the way to add myself the number of locations I want.

Any help or suggestion would be apreciated,

Thanks in advance,

[onehost]

Is it possible to setup banners in-post? as if the banner is part of a post?
if so, I would like an ad to show like every 5 posts or so...

demo:
http://www.patientenfragen.net/en/vo...ome-t1810.html

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by onehost

Is it possible to setup banners in-post? as if the banner is part of a post?
if so, I would like an ad to show like every 5 posts or so...

demo:
http://www.patientenfragen.net/en/vo...ome-t1810.html

Yes sure. put a placeholder in the postbit template and every post will hold a banner, unless they are all used up

However, you presumably use vB4 and then you would use the vBulletin advertising for discussions, select the box to the right of the first/last post, and paste into the Banner HTML a placeholder, set eventually some criteria (which is ideally handled by vbulletin only) and save.

[Nephalim]

Hello. Really nice add-on. Can't wait to really make use of it. Right now I put the <!--@vbbanners:4@--> in the ad_thread_first_content template. copy and paste my google adsense code into the text area of that positions banner in the banner rotation system dropdown. And there's space now where it should be, but it does not show. I have the default VB4 style and custom VB skin. Niether will show my banner there. But I do have my banner working under the navbar. I just went thru all 60 pages here and didn't see help on this.

Thank you much! What did I do wrong? lol

adsense ad size is 200px X 200px

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Nephalim

Hello. Really nice add-on. Can't wait to really make use of it. Right now I put the <!--@vbbanners:4@--> in the ad_thread_first_content template. copy and paste my google adsense code into the text area of that positions banner in the banner rotation system dropdown. And there's space now where it should be, but it does not show. I have the default VB4 style and custom VB skin. Niether will show my banner there. But I do have my banner working under the navbar. I just went thru all 60 pages here and didn't see help on this.

Thank you much! What did I do wrong? lol

adsense ad size is 200px X 200px

There are also some problems reported with Blogs. Probably it is related to caching, which in some way does not handle correctly banner replacements. It is also a version problem, since it has been working until 4.0.3. Maybe refreshing the CMS cache will solve the problem temporarily.