Dynamic Announcements: Programmable Forum Home Announcement/Message with conditionals

This hack allows you to post powerful dynamic announcements (changing according to different conditions) on forum home page. It differs from vbulletin's default announcements in 2 ways:

• The announcement is displayed in forum home page, not inside thread view. So visitors will read them on home page without clicking any links.
• The Hack's announcements are not static: ie. they can be powerfully programmed to display themselves according to many conditions.

This hack is the VB3 version of my Dynamic Forum Home Announcement Hack and it is a bit more improved in that it is now able to display your announcement as it was before AND also in DHTML popup box as well which ever you prefer better or even both. (DHTML poupup announcement is not technically a popup so popup killers can not kill it either.)

Basic Usage : You can set a text in your Admin CP and it's displayed in forum home to all users.

Advanced Usage : With conditionals you can set different texts/notifications/messages/announcements and they will be displayed if your pre-configured condition applies. This allows you to create powerful announcements/private messages/texts which address their receipt only if a certain condition is met. Some examples:

You can set to show an announcement in forum home IF:

1. user is X
2. user's usergroup is Y
3. his profile field Z is X
4. user has X posts or has more than Y posts but less than Z posts
5. his last visit time was X days ago
6. today is X, hour is between Y and Z, day is wednesday, month is Y, week is month's 2nd week, today is user's birthday
7. User is invisible/visible
8. his timeset is set to A
9. etc.

It's tested in vb versions from v.3.0.0 to 3.0.9 and works fine with all of them. It will work for all future 3.0.x versions too. For vb2 version click here.

Here is a Screenshot from a general table announcement.
Here is a Screenshot from a popup announcement.

Some Features:

• It's Admin CP integrated (Screenshot)
• Smiley, BBCode, HTML, IMG tags are supported in announcements.
• You can address your users with their usernames inside announcements (Use $bbuserinfo[username] variable)
• Announcements are displayed directly in Forum Home so users are forced to read them.
• The Conditionals help you to design powerful and ever changing announcements/private messages/forum home notifications.
• Poupup announcement can not be killed by popup killer software

If you install the hack, click INSTALL, thank you..

Hacks of the hack:
* Hack 1: Puts the announcement into header instead of forum home page so that announcement appears in all forum pages.
* Hack 2: Integrates announcement with vBA_CMPS portal hack.
* Hack 3: Popup announcement will popup once in every XX hours.


Logician \\=^))

[Logician]

Originally Posted by tanhadil

Hello $bbuserinfo[username]! Welcome to Desi-Dhaba forums
<div align="center"><a href="http://www.site/subscriptions.php"><img src="http://www.site/image.jpg" border="0"></a>

[[($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]==9)]] Thank you for buying the package.Link for stream will be posted soon[[/($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]==9)]]

i am typing this into the Forum Home Table Announcement in the ADMIN CP..

Usergroup 9 is for the paid subscribers...but they still cant see the message :ermm:

Are you sure 9 is the MAIN usergroup of paid users? Apparently it is not.

[sv1cec]

Is there any reason why the pop-up announcements are shown in Netscape and not in Internet Explorer?

Also, I have two announcements, as shown in the code below. Shouldn't both of them be shown if a user belongs to usergroup 3?

[[($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]==3)]]

Dear $bbuserinfo[username],

You have registered with our forums, but you have not responded to the registration e-mail we send you. If you do not do so in ten days, your account will be suspended.

If you have lost the registration e-mail we send you, or if you didn't receive it, please <A HREF="http://forum.m1911.org/sendmessage.php" target="_blank">contact us</a>, so that we re-send it to you.


Thank you for being here.

The M1911.ORG Forums Site Team

[[/($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]==3)]]


[[($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]>=0)]]

<B>September 11th</B>

Some text here.

[[/($bbuserinfo[usergroupid]>=0)]]

From the two announcements above, only one of them is shown, the one which is first in the list.

Tnx and regards

--------

John

[Logician]

only first matched announcement is displayed by the hack. You can combine them into one if you like to display both. If netscape is displaying, IE should also display.

[sv1cec]

Originally Posted by Logician

only first matched announcement is displayed by the hack. You can combine them into one if you like to display both. If netscape is displaying, IE should also display.

Well, I have the announcement shown in Netscape, but not in IE. Maybe it has something to do with my settings in IE, I do not use it much, so I do not remember all the settings I've changed. Can you please check my site and let me know? It is located at http://forum.m1911.org. I would certainly appreciate it.

As for my other question, I would think that it is more reasonable, if there is a no-conditional announcement, that announcement to be shown to everyone, even if they fall in one of the other conditionals. In that way, a general message could be shown to everyone, together with a specific message to a particular user group, for example.

Rgds and tnx for this hack.
-----------

John

[Bobbo]

Thanks again for this hack Logician. I've made some minor tweaks to this and have it running in VBA CMPS, additionally, I am passing different custom variables via the URL to also get different content to display in different situations. It works great.

I've come across a specific application where I'd like to have a hyperlink that activates the $dfh_announcement_popup on the current page. I realize this is out of the scope of this hack, but if anyone has any ideas, I'd certainly appreciate it.

[Off Topic] The popup contains a flash search tool with predefined searches to help new users find relevant content [/Off Topic]

The trouble for me has been finding a way to activate it on the current page. I'd rather allow the popup to occur on any page the user happens to be on via a clickable 'toggle' rather than routing to a whole different page and then letting the page load the popup...

Thanks.

[AcidJazz]

Logician you rock!

[Symbian.info]

I did use this hack on vb v2.x. And I love it, What I didn't like was the very small editor box.. Way to small to get a overview of all the messages.
So is there a beter editor for the vb 3.x version?? If not, can somebody make a hack for it??

[lazytown]

Someone asked this before and it wasn't answered in any of the 14 pages, so I'll try it again.

Is there a way to make it so that the popup only displays once ever for a user, or is this already possible?

If they close the announcement and log back in next time, does the same popup still display for them? If so, is there a way to prevent that from happening?

Thanks!
-V

[sv1cec]

Originally Posted by vissa

Someone asked this before and it wasn't answered in any of the 14 pages, so I'll try it again.

Is there a way to make it so that the popup only displays once ever for a user, or is this already possible?

If they close the announcement and log back in next time, does the same popup still display for them? If so, is there a way to prevent that from happening?

Thanks!
-V

Yes, the pop-up keeps coming up again and again, every time they log in. I wish someone could make a "check box" to remove it, but it's not easy. Some sort of indexing between that particular announcement and each user should exist. As far as I know the announcements are not indexed in any way, so I am not sure we will ever see such an improvement.

I have to assume, a different method has to be used to create and store the annoucements.

Rgds
--------
John

[fiber1]

Not going to happen with this script, It just was not designed for that.

Would be nice though!

Fiber