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 CSS59

got it to work if I put it in the table directly but won't in Advertisements blocks

can we get a banner index users can browse? Similar tot his
http://honda-tech.com/vendor_directory.php

Sorry, this product is no fully driven global advertising management.

Although it may become one, it will need a consistent number (say about 100 x $200) of paying customers in order to allow me to hire a person who could also help in all tasks which may arise with such. However I believe, nobody will pay such an amount on a regular basis, unless it would be a power tool like there are already many in the wild web ...

Please don't understand me wrong, but evolving this product at the current state of stability and comfort has taken many years and every line of code was thought thoroughly in order to make it work from vBulletin's stone age until now on all systems with no flaw. Porting it to a new level would cost many more years and I'm pretty not sure if all this efford will then be paid off

[CSS59]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Sorry, this product is no fully driven global advertising management.

Although it may become one, it will need a consistent number (say about 100 x $200) of paying customers in order to allow me to hire a person who could also help in all tasks which may arise with such. However I believe, nobody will pay such an amount on a regular basis, unless it would be a power tool like there are already many in the wild web ...

Please don't understand me wrong, but evolving this product at the current state of stability and comfort has taken many years and every line of code was thought thoroughly in order to make it work from vBulletin's stone age until now on all systems with no flaw. Porting it to a new level would cost many more years and I'm pretty not sure if all this efford will then be paid off

I see

I'm willing to pay you for a separate simple (and more manual) page that uses some of the vb functions to make a simple page listing the vendors. Are you interested? I can PM you my ideas if you are.

[jjdurrant]

Maybe I missed it, but how do I just place the ads in header and footer like ad manager does?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by CSS59

I see

I'm willing to pay you for a separate simple (and more manual) page that uses some of the vb functions to make a simple page listing the vendors. Are you interested? I can PM you my ideas if you are.

We can try, but I'm terribly overrun by work and any kind of it may take weeks or months to complete. I'm unable to tell when I have time to put hands on

I have some enhancements scheduled by weeks now and had no chance even to plan things for just one more option and a few lines of code. Brainstorming and discussing however takes much less time ...

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by jjdurrant

Maybe I missed it, but how do I just place the ads in header and footer like ad manager does?

Yeah

The help file shows how to put a banner below the navbar. If you search this thread for header2, you get other hints of how to use the logo banner space. In a very similar manner they apply also to the footer.

[Videx]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

We can try, but I'm terribly overrun by work and any kind of it may take weeks or months to complete.

It does look like a complicated thing to implement in any kind of automatic way - actually adding and subtracting vendors as the timer expires.

All the content in the sponsor block would have to be done manually anyway - like the address and the vetted optional map button. Also in the link you gave it looks like they've set up accounts for each vendor and since it seems unlikely each vendor really has a membership on the forum, I imagine those are just dummy accounts set up manually that forward messages to an email.

Anyway, we did this long ago with "sponsors" pages in our CMS. We could add or subtract pages easily, but we tend to just leave them there. Also nice for sponsors without their own links.

[Jakub03]

I installed the mod but which position do i choose to make it appear in the global header and footer?

[macrocamaleon]

Working in 4.1.9

Thanks for share...

Regards

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Videx

It does look like a complicated thing to implement in any kind of automatic way - actually adding and subtracting vendors as the timer expires.

All the content in the sponsor block would have to be done manually anyway - like the address and the vetted optional map button. Also in the link you gave it looks like they've set up accounts for each vendor and since it seems unlikely each vendor really has a membership on the forum, I imagine those are just dummy accounts set up manually that forward messages to an email.

Anyway, we did this long ago with "sponsors" pages in our CMS. We could add or subtract pages easily, but we tend to just leave them there. Also nice for sponsors without their own links.

I see this as the best solution and no work for me

Eventually this CMS section is ordered alphabetically and makes a much nicer list than any other solution.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Jakub03

I installed the mod but which position do i choose to make it appear in the global header and footer?

You normally will choose a single banner position, but make changes to your templates where you wish to show them. In other words, this is no code injection plugin