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

[Nephalim]

OK thank you. I don't have the CMS, just the bulletin board . Maybe I can use the regular VBulletin spot for that one?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Nephalim

OK thank you. I don't have the CMS, just the bulletin board . Maybe I can use the regular VBulletin spot for that one?

Yes of course

The vBulletin ad_* templates work best for RBS placeholders.

[Arae]

Can I use this add-on for a rotating header (itself) of the forums?
I don't have any ads at the moment but I'm looking for a rotating header banners every refresh.

^__^

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Arae

Can I use this add-on for a rotating header (itself) of the forums?
I don't have any ads at the moment but I'm looking for a rotating header banners every refresh.

^__^

With some restrictions it may work with headers, but I can't tell, because I never tried. If you have your styles in files, probably it will not work, because they are plugged together from the client's browsers. However, try and let us know

[biggeorge]

I cannot get this to work... 4.0.7, Maybe it's me.

No offense to the work the developer put into this mod, but there should be an easier way to rotate banners, and it shouldn't be restricted to only 10 banners.

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by biggeorge

No offense to the work the developer put into this mod, but there should be an easier way to rotate banners, and it shouldn't be restricted to only 10 banners.

It's not restricted to 10 banners. It's restricted to 10 different banner sizes/shapes.

Once you define the type of banner, you can have as many separate banners of that size and shape rotating within a single placeholder. Then you still have 9 other placeholders to use.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by 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,

Sorry, I missed this question

In the banner options, you may select for each banner where (forum section) to show up, thus you can use one and the same placeholder to fill all 50 or more forum sections without any collision problem.

You don't have to worry about banner id's either. If you have for "forum 1" about 20 banners, they will rotate, even though you may have only 1 placeholder on a page. Rotating is done randomly and is pretty much even on all instances of banners for that page.

If you have the same placeholder more times on a page, say under the navbar and above the footer, 2 different banners will be taken for those placeholders, with the same randomness and guarantee to be unique on that page. No banner is ever shown twice on the same page.

If you put together all the possible filters for a banner, besides timing, you get as many locations as you need, without using actually more than one or two of the 10 available locations / shapes / banner sizes / banner types or whatever you want to call them . The software design makes it possible to reuse a single placeholder for many occasions.

Although it seems to be difficult to explain, it is easy to use. Just think about a glass. You may fill it with water, juice, beer or wine. You may also use sand, gasoline or bullets if you wish. Normally you would not mix one of the drinks, nor would you throw away the glass after using it. Depending of the occasion, you will probably reuse the same glass as often as possible with as many drinks you may think of. In you parties you'll have green and blue smoking cocktails with fuzzy glitter and funny taste, on company meetings you'll rather offer something more sobre, unless you need to surprise the other companies about your taste

[biggeorge]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

It's not restricted to 10 banners. It's restricted to 10 different banner sizes/shapes.

Once you define the type of banner, you can have as many separate banners of that size and shape rotating within a single placeholder. Then you still have 9 other placeholders to use.

So I went back and tried again. I was making a very simple error and not removing the % from the <!--@vbbanners:%d@--> tag. It's now up and running, and I'm happy I gave it a second try. Thank you.

[Devanand]

I have problem with counting clicks if I use text form to enter code. It's count impressions but not clicks.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Devanand

I have problem with counting clicks if I use text form to enter code. It's count impressions but not clicks.

This is what the manual says

If you wish to count clicks, you will have to include the respective code in your script as well. If you enable click tracking for an image banner, you will see what it needs.

Basically you'll have to call the [forumhome]rbs_banner.php?id=123 script, where 123 is your banner id. Unfortunately I'm unable to tell what happens if there is one or no destination URL. Most probably you'll have to fix the script for your specific needs, too. I believe it may work, if your scripts have no dynamic destination.