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

[shabbirbhimani]

Almost all issues (98%) we have had yet are because you people believe in magic

No I don't

The other 1.5% of problems are because as a first step after installing you delete right away the default banners, without inserting however a valid and working banner. A 0.4% finally forgets they have vbSEO HTML cleaning options enabled. An the rest (0.1%) are missing images, erratic HTML, misspelling or true server related problems.

No I don't have vbSEO installed nor did I delete the default banners. I am trying to show the default banners only as of now but no luck.

This product does not modify your styles, templates or messages by itself. You will have to open a template and make a change to it, adding for example:

<!--@vbbanners:0@-->

and save. Then (if you have still the default banners) one of them show up at the designed location. Once you have mastered this step, all the rest is just a question of trial and failure.

Still it does not work with vB3.8

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by shabbirbhimani

Still it does not work with vB3.8

It has worked for me from 3.x right through to 4.1.5 so if it's not working for you you're doing something wrong.

[shabbirbhimani]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

It has worked for me from 3.x right through to 4.1.5 so if it's not working for you you're doing something wrong.

Trying once again on fresh vb3.8 on my localhost to see if it works.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by shabbirbhimani

No I don't

No I don't have vbSEO installed nor did I delete the default banners. I am trying to show the default banners only as of now but no luck.

Still it does not work with vB3.8

I haven't had yet one single case where it didn't work or where I wasn't able to get it run in some way.

Thus I'm sure I can prove you wrong

If you have a site online, please send me the credentials for an admin account with maintenance, settings and styles rights via PM.

[shabbirbhimani]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

I haven't had yet one single case where it didn't work or where I wasn't able to get it run in some way.

Thus I'm sure I can prove you wrong

If you have a site online, please send me the credentials for an admin account with maintenance, settings and styles rights via PM.

I would have loved to but as of now I have settled with vbsponsor plugin and though I have the plugin installed it is de-activated. If I plan to re-activate it once again I will PM You. Thanks for offering such great help.

[demo7up]

i can run scripts fine im having an issue using locally stored images how can i do that?

[demo7up]

NVM i figured it out my start date was for tomorrow ..... lol

[x YNWA x]

There are no instructions with this other than a big PDF file explaining what it is.

I have uploaded the files in upload, imported the xml into admincp and the ad system is there. I even uploaded the addons folder to the forum root and the content of the addons folder to the forum root since there were no instructions saying what to do with that folder.

So I now have this banner system in there and I can see there are two default ones, but they do not display on the forum at all. Do I need to edit my templates to get them to show?

[x YNWA x]

Ok So I had to disable the cleanup of HTML on VBSEO for it to work, which is a shame.

So what I am trying to get my head around is these positions.

I have 1 advert there and on the advert page it asks me to choose a position. In my template I have <!--@vbbanners:0@--> global under the nav bar and I also have <!--@vbbanners:0@--> in the rotating banner settings page.

But if I change the banner to position 6, the banner still appears, how does all that work?

Also in the options, do I need to edit the Nth placeholder to add more positions or do I just leave it as <!--@vbbanners:0@-->? If I want more positions to be used, do I just fill the box like this <!--@vbbanners:0@-->, <!--@vbbanners:1@-->, <!--@vbbanners:2@--> etc.?

I want to use several positions.

1 global under nav
1 under thread list
1 after 15 posts
1 after each post
1 after the forum lists but above the footer, who's online etc. I realise I may need to do some manual edits to achieve this.

Just trying to get my head around the placeholder thing. Thanks

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by x YNWA x

Ok So I had to disable the cleanup of HTML on VBSEO for it to work, which is a shame.

So what I am trying to get my head around is these positions.

I have 1 advert there and on the advert page it asks me to choose a position. In my template I have <!--@vbbanners:0@--> global under the nav bar and I also have <!--@vbbanners:0@--> in the rotating banner settings page.

But if I change the banner to position 6, the banner still appears, how does all that work?

Also in the options, do I need to edit the Nth placeholder to add more positions or do I just leave it as <!--@vbbanners:0@-->? If I want more positions to be used, do I just fill the box like this <!--@vbbanners:0@-->, <!--@vbbanners:1@-->, <!--@vbbanners:2@--> etc.?

I want to use several positions.

1 global under nav
1 under thread list
1 after 15 posts
1 after each post
1 after the forum lists but above the footer, who's online etc. I realise I may need to do some manual edits to achieve this.

Just trying to get my head around the placeholder thing. Thanks

You can use vbSEO HTML cleaning, but then you have to change the placeholder to something different than a HTML comment. As told in the large PDF file

You normally would use the same placeholder over and over again in most of your templates. The formula inside will fill each same placeholder with a different banner as long as you have some in the database. You very rarely would use another "location" than 0. Thus, you would use

<!--@vbbanners:0@-->

one or more times in a page, and each time another banner appears, unless you have less available.

Of course, the placeholder looks the way as defined in the options