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 tomshawk

According to your updates section, the last vb up to is 4.0.2

Does this work with 4.2.0

Just asking as the adverts system in vb is not working for me.

Thanks

yes

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by alaska_av8r

Did anyone ever find out why the start date and end date automatically increments the hourly valude as mentioned in post 2116.

Mine behaves the same way, I set a start time and end time and it will automatically increment to a later time as you save a setting.

If I set it to end at 0200 and click save, when I look at it again it shows 0400, if I change nothing and hit save it shows 0600.

We have discussed this problem several times, and essentially there is a timing difference between the local time of the web server and the MySQL server. Since MySQL runs as root and Apache not always, there may be time zone differences. Best of all is to make sure that these differences do not exist, alternatively adjust the time zone of the web server in order to match the system time. Also, your system should not change time due to DST, but at most the time zone for their user accounts. And, of course, you should use NTP to sync date and time frequently.

In any case, this information is only for system administrators and it is really, "really" the last time I will ever mention it

[bada_bing]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

photopost does not call the final page rendering of vbulletin, thus banners would not get rendered in photopost.

So what does that mean, this product will not work in photopost? Or is there a way to make it work we must have banners in that section

[HellRZR]

I agree, getting this to work in Photopost would be great, is there a way, or are there plans for this?

[tomshawk]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

yes

Awesome, thank you. Installing in a few

[alaska_av8r]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

We have discussed this problem several times, and essentially there is a timing difference between the local time of the web server and the MySQL server. Since MySQL runs as root and Apache not always, there may be time zone differences. Best of all is to make sure that these differences do not exist, alternatively adjust the time zone of the web server in order to match the system time. Also, your system should not change time due to DST, but at most the time zone for their user accounts. And, of course, you should use NTP to sync date and time frequently.

In any case, this information is only for system administrators and it is really, "really" the last time I will ever mention it

Y2ksw, thank you for the explanation, I did search but did not realize that was applicable to the problem. I am not too computer savvy as far as servers and timing go, so once again thanks for taking the time to explain it.

What you explain makes sense to me as far as their being a difference, but it befuddles me as to how this would cause the time to continuously change each time I viewed it, each time increasing 2 hrs, I have other plugins that use timing and seem not to be affected, but I know your busy so no need to elaborate on that one I shall continue to live in ignorance of such...lol

thanks
tim

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by bada_bing

So what does that mean, this product will not work in photopost? Or is there a way to make it work we must have banners in that section

Originally Posted by HellRZR

I agree, getting this to work in Photopost would be great, is there a way, or are there plans for this?

If somebody would have success and share their experience ...

But unless then, the banners will not work in photopost, because photopost does not use the standard final page rendering.

There is no plan to make it work for photopost. I am sorry, but I'm personally against hacking into software just because somebody hasen't used standard procedures as reccomended.

[bada_bing]

Does anyone know which template and where to add of I wanted the banner to show up on left or right side of my forums ?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by bada_bing

Does anyone know which template and where to add of I wanted the banner to show up on left or right side of my forums ?

You may create a sidebar block for a banner.

If you however want to add a free space inside the page area, you must change a lot of pages, and maybe the everywhere sidebar is a better solution.

You may also try to add a background image via CSS, but I doubt it would work with this product, both because styles may be cached locally by your browser and maybe the templates are not passing through the last rendering process, because cached by vBulletin itself.

[bada_bing]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

You may create a sidebar block for a banner.

If you however want to add a free space inside the page area, you must change a lot of pages, and maybe the everywhere sidebar is a better solution.

You may also try to add a background image via CSS, but I doubt it would work with this product, both because styles may be cached locally by your browser and maybe the templates are not passing through the last rendering process, because cached by vBulletin itself.

Yes I want to add the banner on as a side bar and not sure how to do this, I cant use the everywhere sidebar hack because that is for vb 4.x series and we are using vb 3.8 series