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 My Hattiesburg

I inserted the google code directly into the head include template. After looking, though, I just discovered that I had not included it in another skin that I'm working on, but that skin is not used much right now.

As for all the pages not being indexed, a few months back we were getting slammed by spam bots and I'm not sure what else. Our server loads were running real high at times and at some points got so high that it shut the site down. I was looking here at vb.org for any kind of answer as well as getting our tech guy to pore over the server looking for anything that we could do to fix it. I added a couple of mods to block the spam bots and also modified my robots.txt file as someone here had recommended. After looking at the robots.txt file it's not blocking as many pages as I thought it might be so the analytics stats wasn't missing that much.

At this point I really don't know what to think. I do think that it's highly unlikely that 2 ads together are getting 1 million impressions a month on our site. Because of this we decided to offer ads on a monthly rate instead of by impressions. We were going to offer them at $1.50/thousand then changed it to $1.00 but at that rate my ad would cost me $500/month with the number of impressions it's gotten. There's no way I can justify that.

Yeah. But bots are server issues and firewalling is one of the tasks which one way or another should be covered from your hosting provider. There are a few giveaway tips, but most aren't. One of them are fail2ban filters on apache records

[My Hattiesburg]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Yeah. But bots are server issues and firewalling is one of the tasks which one way or another should be covered from your hosting provider. There are a few giveaway tips, but most aren't. One of them are fail2ban filters on apache records

I hope this is not getting off topic, but we don't have a host provider, we're attempting to manage the server ourselves at this point to save some money. Maybe once we get some ads going we can afford to go the managed route (which is actually what I'm working towards). But are you saying that a firewall would keep out the spambots and prevent an artificially high number of ad impressions?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by My Hattiesburg

I hope this is not getting off topic, but we don't have a host provider, we're attempting to manage the server ourselves at this point to save some money. Maybe once we get some ads going we can afford to go the managed route (which is actually what I'm working towards). But are you saying that a firewall would keep out the spambots and prevent an artificially high number of ad impressions?

Yes, sure. And it saves a lot of bandwidth and hacking attempts as well. If your site gets spammed heavily, it sooner or later gets hacked, too.

I use the Spamhaus DROP list to cut off the obvious and use fail2ban to fine-tune the firewall, besides of blacklisting all far too obvious login and register attempts by several scripts. Summing up, it means to cut off almost all unnecessary traffic and thus reducing also the hit count on ads.

Oh well ... and I use connection- and bandwidth-throttling for spiders, too.

[dariyos]

i need more banner statistics

i want daily statistics for each banner, were i can select the name of the banner
...then shows up the pageviews & clicks per month, day, week, and total.

is that possible?

now it shows only the total statistics from first to last click, that is not enough information.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by dariyos

i need more banner statistics

i want daily statistics for each banner, were i can select the name of the banner
...then shows up the pageviews & clicks per month, day, week, and total.

is that possible?

now it shows only the total statistics from first to last click, that is not enough information.

All you need is found in the rbs_hits table. You may extract all information by entering some queries from phpmyadmin

This query gives you, for example, a daily count of clicks on all banners:

SELECT h.dateline-MOD(h.dateline, 86400) AS dateline, COUNT(*) AS cnt
FROM rbs_banners b
LEFT JOIN rbs_hits h ON b.id = h.bannerid
GROUP BY h.dateline-MOD(h.dateline, 86400)
ORDER BY h.dateline

[aaronhaul]

Hello Guys,

Has anybody tried the Rotating Banner System on "First Post Content" and "Last Post Content" on thread positions?

I put the codes:
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:7@--></div> and
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:8@--></div>

on each Ad Banner positions inside the thread, and none of the banners displays on any of the post.

Is there any solution for this?

[johnscanlan2]

This is a small problem, but perhaps someone can shed some light on what is going on. RE:

Inserting the code into the SECOND POST mod...

When I insert for example <!--@Vbbanners:7@-->(Any number between 0 and 10) it works just fine rotating like it should. However when I enter <!--vbbanners:17@--> (Any number 11 and over) nothing shows up in the SECOND POST MOD. I have checked everything a dozen times and without fail any double digit location fails. This only holds true when using the SECOND POST mod. Anywhere else it is fine.

I will be posting the same question on the second post mod area. The work around is easy of course by restricting any rotation to 0 through 9. The geek in me wants to know why.

This is a GREAT mod.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by johnscanlan2

This is a small problem, but perhaps someone can shed some light on what is going on. RE:

Inserting the code into the SECOND POST mod...

When I insert for example <!--@Vbbanners:7@-->(Any number between 0 and 10) it works just fine rotating like it should. However when I enter <!--vbbanners:17@--> (Any number 11 and over) nothing shows up in the SECOND POST MOD. I have checked everything a dozen times and without fail any double digit location fails. This only holds true when using the SECOND POST mod. Anywhere else it is fine.

I will be posting the same question on the second post mod area. The work around is easy of course by restricting any rotation to 0 through 9. The geek in me wants to know why.

This is a GREAT mod.

As it says in the options, in bold red letters: for more than 10 locations there is absolutely no support.

[johnscanlan2]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

As it says in the options, in bold red letters: for more than 10 locations there is absolutely no support.

Not looking for "support" from the author, I was just making a simple request to this thread.
As I stated I already had a satisfactory work around, I was just being curious as I indicated.

If you don't want users to ask questions of this group perhaps you should lock this thread. I apologize for causing you any stress.

[aaronhaul]

Hello Guys,

Has anybody tried the Rotating Banner System on "First Post Content" and "Last Post Content" on thread positions?

I put the codes:
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:7@--></div> and
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:8@--></div>

on each Ad Banner positions inside the thread, and none of the banners displays on any of the post.

Is there any solution for this?