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 Gripi

hi.. i saw in 2.3.3 version:

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.

but.. in here, the time still go randomly, sometimes 15.00, sometimes 17.00.

and let say i already set the start date to 1 March 2012, the end date 2 March 2013, then i save it. then i open the banner configuration again, without changing anything in the configuration, i press the save button, then open it again, the start date become 2 March 2012, and the end date become 3 March 2013.

is this a bugs?

Originally Posted by viper357

I have the same issue, whenever I save a new or old banner, it forwards the time by 8 hours, so if I set the banner to expire on 1 March at 1pm, when I click save it will change the time 8 hours ahead to 9pm, if I click save again it will go forward another 8 hours and change the expiry date to 2 March 5am.

These are issues with the server time differing with the database time. Normally, your server and database must match the same time zone and of course be synchronized in order to match the saving. There is not much I can do. All I suggest is to keep your servers going with UTC and in-sync for at least once a week. On crontab you would typically use:

0       5       *       *       *       root    /usr/sbin/ntpdate xx.pool.ntp.org>/dev/null 2>&1

where xx is the country code. Please see ntp.org for valid pools. Also note that if your server time has gone wild, it may need first a manual setup, since NTP will not adjust differences larger than 59 minutes 59 seconds.

If you issue a "SHOW NOW()" query, you may find out if the database is in-sync. On the server side, you would issue a date command with your root account. On Windows servers, this may be a bit tricky, because your webserver account should sync with UTC+0, but normally isn't.

In any case there are other possible issues with it and I really don't want to come down to this level.

[I.G.O.T.A.]

Doesn't seem to work with 4.1.11. Any ideas?

[Rckcrwlr]

Originally Posted by IGOTASTi

Doesn't seem to work with 4.1.11. Any ideas?

Working for me.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by IGOTASTi

Doesn't seem to work with 4.1.11. Any ideas?

Works for me, too

[rhody401]

It works very well for me too.

Here's an example to put a rotating ad under each thread, just before the reply button:

(It took me a while to figure this out, so here it is for anyone else in the same boat)

Admin CP: Styles & Templates -> Style Manager -> edit template -> postbit templates -> postbit_legacy

......at the VERY END add this:

PHP Code:

<vb:if condition="$post['islastshown']">
 <div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:0@--></div><br />
</vb:if> 


Thanks for the great tool!

[TheDevil666Damo]

If I CTRL and select the forums to display and not display the banner in there is no option for it to display on the homepage, ie. It only displays on the homepage when it is set to display everywhere, as soon as as you start selecting forums there is no option for the forum homepage and the banner doesn't display there...unless I am missing something?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by TheDevil666Damo

If I CTRL and select the forums to display and not display the banner in there is no option for it to display on the homepage, ie. It only displays on the homepage when it is set to display everywhere, as soon as as you start selecting forums there is no option for the forum homepage and the banner doesn't display there...unless I am missing something?

There is a checkbox for the home page, since there is no item for the home in the list. However if you want to show the banners everywhere, just leave everything unselected

[K a M a L]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

There is a checkbox for the home page, since there is no item for the home in the list. However if you want to show the banners everywhere, just leave everything unselected

Check box for home page displays banner only on homepage , what if I want to display banner on forum1 + homepage ?

[TheDevil666Damo]

Originally Posted by K a M a L

Check box for home page displays banner only on homepage , what if I want to display banner on forum1 + homepage ?

Exactly, which is what I want to do, its just not possible at the moment which seems strange, ideally 'home' should be in the list as an option.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by K a M a L

Check box for home page displays banner only on homepage , what if I want to display banner on forum1 + homepage ?

Originally Posted by TheDevil666Damo

Exactly, which is what I want to do, its just not possible at the moment which seems strange, ideally 'home' should be in the list as an option.

You may duplicate a banner and have one for the forum home alone plus one for a single forum section.