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

[Videx]

Gotta second the idea of a sortable list. Once you get much beyond 5 ads it gets really hard to find specific ones.

[Automaton]

Is there a way to connect this with the sbscription feature so that advertisers banners are based on the amound of time they signed up for in the vb subscrition page?

[y2ksw]

Thanks for the tips

The banners in fact can be excluded or included by using style conditionals.

The banner overview will come soon, and the subscriptions are a nice idea. Then it would also need a user interface for the service buyer in order to setup the subscription ... can you please elaborate a bit how you would like to see it as a customer?

[acorndomains.co]

Nice tool, thanks a lot.

I am using it slightly differently, I have only 2 ad locations I want to show rotating banners, a 235x60 in the header and a 468x60 in the footer.

I use the standard Horizontal placeholder "@vbbanners@" for any header ads, and the "@vbbanners_vertical@" for any footer ads, ticking "vertical" in the ad set-up, even though the ads are not vertical it seems to work.

Cool :-)


www.acorndomains.co.uk

[RedTrinity]

Kudos to you, great hack!! Much better than the previous one I was using which was limited to about 10 banners max.

Installed and using, with a lot more ease than before so thanks

[Automaton]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Thanks for the tips

The banners in fact can be excluded or included by using style conditionals.

The banner overview will come soon, and the subscriptions are a nice idea. Then it would also need a user interface for the service buyer in order to setup the subscription ... can you please elaborate a bit how you would like to see it as a customer?

Sure.
Ultimately When a potential advertiser clicks on our ADVERTISE WITH US link either in the forum our on our home page, it will go to the subscriptions options page with all the drop down menus.

We might have... 4 options for advertisors, each with its own drop down menu and subscription length options.

Once a vendor selects the option they want, and the length of time they want from the drop down menu, they should be given the opportunity to upload a banner. Either by way of URL or by browsing their computer files. This banner upload feature can be before or after payment. Whatever is easiest for you.

The proceed with payment like normal. Our Merchant is paypal so thats where they go.
Once paid, their banner is inserted in to the rotator and the setting are based on the option and length of time they signed up for.

That would be ideal.
This way
Banners are only up while they pay for the feature. Soon as the subscription is expired or cancelled, the banner comes down, and we ans well as the vendor get a notification.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Automaton

Sure.
Ultimately When a potential advertiser clicks on our ADVERTISE WITH US link either in the forum our on our home page, it will go to the subscriptions options page with all the drop down menus.

We might have... 4 options for advertisors, each with its own drop down menu and subscription length options.

Once a vendor selects the option they want, and the length of time they want from the drop down menu, they should be given the opportunity to upload a banner. Either by way of URL or by browsing their computer files. This banner upload feature can be before or after payment. Whatever is easiest for you.

The proceed with payment like normal. Our Merchant is paypal so thats where they go.
Once paid, their banner is inserted in to the rotator and the setting are based on the option and length of time they signed up for.

That would be ideal.
This way
Banners are only up while they pay for the feature. Soon as the subscription is expired or cancelled, the banner comes down, and we ans well as the vendor get a notification.

This way however you would need also vendor handling. As vBulletin works, there is only one vendor: the board owner, and all subscription payments go to one account. Also there is no way to tell the number of items you buy, all vBulletin subscriptions are limited by time only and each additional subscription adds only time.

To make it work for more vendors, the whole payment and subscription should work differently, more like in an auction. Then it would be also more easy to define other criterias, such as how many banners you could insert for the chosen period. Well, if the vendors are listed in a similar table as the banners and the rules are not too many, it should be possible to make it. The payment ID returned to both the board and the buyer will make that a sort of ticket, to allow one or more banner uploads.

The problems I see are the setup which is left to the buyer and the possible implications if they are using scripts, like messing up your pages or installing spyware and worms. Maybe scripts shouldn't be available, right?

I have to think a little about it ...

[Automaton]

Please keep me posted. I am very interested in this type of product

[kingmotox]

I am running photoposts classifieds program and for some reason the banner doesn't show in the header there but i can see the code. Any suggestions?

http://www.dezertrangers.com/classifieds

Thanks

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by kingmotox

I am running photoposts classifieds program and for some reason the banner doesn't show in the header there but i can see the code. Any suggestions?

http://www.dezertrangers.com/classifieds

Thanks

I would suggest to replace the @vbbanners@ placeholder (vBulletin Options, bottom) with something like <!-- @banner@ --> (HTML Comment) in order to hide advertising in scripts which eventually don't call the vBulletin standard page closure, and thus jump over the global_complete hook.