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

[oddmud]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Looks like a CSS/float issue.

I understand that, but I can't figure out how to fix it.

[oddmud]

Why will the <!--@vbbanners:2@--> not work inside the vBulletin Ad Manager?

That would be the best way to implement it wouldn't it? Then I can control it's location properly.

The CSS/float issue is because for some reason when I put it in the ad_global_header2 template it's not showing there, and it's not pulling the css properly from the additional.css. It for some reason is showing up in ad_global_header, and isn't listening to the css instructions.

[oddmud]

I'm also having issues here with using vBSEO's clean up HTML. Since I have to put the <!--@vbbanners:#@--> directly in the template, it's cutting it out and not displaying the ad.

Are we going to be able to put this code inside the vBulletin Ad Manger at some point?

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by oddmud

I'm also having issues here with using vBSEO's clean up HTML. Since I have to put the <!--@vbbanners:#@--> directly in the template, it's cutting it out and not displaying the ad.

Are we going to be able to put this code inside the vBulletin Ad Manger at some point?

That vBSEO feature (cleanup white space) accomplishes nothing really useful. vBSEO does a lot of things quite well and has a lot of features but just because a feature exists doesn't mean you have to use it. There are several newer vBSEO features that actually have a negative impact on server performance.

The cleanup feature doesn't negatively impact performance but it DOES interfere with this mod and what it does is entirely superfluous. Spiders can navigate white space and ignore comments quite well - that's what they are designed to do - and any impact of comment lines on page load speeds is purely theoretical.

Your choice: Include a vBSEO feature which really has minimal or zero benefit to your forum OR disable that feature and use the rotating banners mod which can potentially have a huge benefit for you and your forum.

For me it was an easy decision.

[oddmud]

Well it did speed up my page load significantly, but maybe I can work it another way. I'm trying to speed up the load of my forum, as it's showing slow to google. Slow site = worse rankings.

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by oddmud

Well it did speed up my page load significantly, but maybe I can work it another way. I'm trying to speed up the load of my forum, as it's showing slow to google. Slow site = worse rankings.

What did you use to measure page load and come to that conclusion? As I said, what that feature does is primarily compress pages by removing white space and comments and frankly that should have a neglible effect on either SEO or load speed.

If your page is loading slowly, you'd be further ahead by ensuring that your server and vBulletin are enabled for gzip.

[oddmud]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

What did you use to measure page load and come to that conclusion? As I said, what that feature does is primarily compress pages by removing white space and comments and frankly that should have a neglible effect on either SEO or load speed.

If your page is loading slowly, you'd be further ahead by ensuring that your server and vBulletin are enabled for gzip.

I use webpagetest.org, and google's site performance rating to determine what speed my pages are running at.

How do I go about making sure the Gzip is working optimal for Vbulletin?

GZIP HTML Output : Yes
GZIP Compression Level: 1

[oddmud]

Using all that as well..

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by oddmud

GZIP HTML Output : Yes
GZIP Compression Level: 1

Is it enabled on your server? Check with your host of necessary.

If you're still loading slowly, you might want to investigate server caching, e.g., eAccelerate, XCache, or at least file caching at the server level.

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by oddmud

Using all that as well..

Your forum is heavily modded but seems to load fairly quickly for me. However, two things I can see right away as problems that may contribute to slow page loads are that annoying vBSEO tweets script and the chat room.

Think about disabling some of your add-ons and rechecking load speeds until you find out what's dragging down your forum.

Also, are you using Google Analytics? Google itself identified that as one of the things slowing my page loads. I dumped it - I get enough stats from AWSTATS anyway.