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

[bzcomputers]

Working well on 4.2 PL3.
Have one issue with ads not displaying in another mod created in CakePHP (just shows the position reference), but I'm pretty sure it isn't an issue with this mod.

Request:
The ability to select multiple positions for the same banner. This would make it easier for webmasters to track if the same banner performs better in one position versus another.

I know you could just create another banner with the same code and select a separate position, but that would completely defeat the purpose of setting max impressions and max clicks for a given banner.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by bzcomputers

Working well on 4.2 PL3.
Have one issue with ads not displaying in another mod created in CakePHP (just shows the position reference), but I'm pretty sure it isn't an issue with this mod.

Request:
The ability to select multiple positions for the same banner. This would make it easier for webmasters to track if the same banner performs better in one position versus another.

I know you could just create another banner with the same code and select a separate position, but that would completely defeat the purpose of setting max impressions and max clicks for a given banner.

I believe that with the upcoming version 5 of vBulletin it will be unavoidabile to move the whole thing to a new level ... mainly because there will be no hook at all to intercept the final page output. At that point, all possibile and immaginable associations could be realized, because printing a banner would not request any efford to your servers, but to ours (:erm.

In other words, we will have to create a new, fully driven advertising system which then will serve the banners you wish to see on your site, as external input. Once the system is up and running for a while, we may release the whole thing to the public domain. The problem however is the relatively high demand of development hours to achieve this, and most of all, how to convince everybody to use it, when there are other systems. I really don't want to make concurrence to anybody else out there ... i have already enough fighting just as is

[brihan]

Originally Posted by tibobdenazareth

Rathar than editing postbit_legacy AND showthread_firstpost_sig templates, we cand edit postbit_legacy te,plate by adding a third section for after the first post. In that sense, the ad will fall truly AFTER the first post rather than above the signature. Here's the code.

NB- for the mobile version, that's the only way we can get something after the first post since the showthread_firstpost templates do not exist.

<vb:if condition="THIS_SCRIPT == 'showthread' AND (($post['postcount'] % 15 == 10) OR $post['postcount'] == 10)">
<div class="thread_controls">
<div style="width: 100%; text-align: center">
<!--@vbbanners:3@--><!--@vbbanners:3@-->
</div>
</div>
<vb:elseif condition="THIS_SCRIPT == 'showthread' AND (($post['postcount'] % 15 == 5) OR $post['postcount'] == 5)" />
<div class="thread_controls">
<div style="width: 100%; text-align: center">
<!--@vbbanners:2@--><!--@vbbanners:2@-->
</div>
</div>
<vb:elseif condition="THIS_SCRIPT == 'showthread' AND $post['postcount'] == 1" />
<div class="thread_controls">
<div style="width: 100%; text-align: center">
<!--@vbbanners:1@--><!--@vbbanners:1@-->
</div>
</div>
</vb:if>

Thank you for this information.

Could you explain it a little more. I see that this edit is for the postbit_legacy template but I'm not exactly sure where in that template you are adding this and should "THIS_SCRIPT" be changed to something else?

Thanks for any help anyone can offer.

[vithorius]

Is it possible to use this as a vBadvanced module?

(thank you!)

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by vithorius

Is it possible to use this as a vBadvanced module?

(thank you!)

You may insert a banner placeholder in a HTML module in order to show a banner there.

[Judith2]

I can only fit 6 banner in the sidebar, is there the opportunity to expand it to 11 banner?

<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:4@--></div><br />
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:5@--></div><br />
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:6@--></div><br />
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:7@--></div><br />
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:8@--></div><br />
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:9@--></div>

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Judith2

I can only fit 6 banner in the sidebar, is there the opportunity to expand it to 11 banner?

You would just use one placeholder N times one below each other and have at least that N number of banners for that location in database.

[datoneer]

Thank you it is really a great mod! Installed and rated 5 stars

[Judith2]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

You would just use one placeholder N times one below each other and have at least that N number of banners for that location in database.

Um, unfortunately, I am a layman, could you explain it to me with an example?

[bzcomputers]

Originally Posted by Judith2

Um, unfortunately, I am a layman, could you explain it to me with an example?

He just talking about using the same place holder like....


<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:3@--></div><br />
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:3@--></div><br />
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:3@--></div><br />
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:3@--></div><br />
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:3@--></div><br />
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:3@--></div>

Then just making sure you have at least that number of ads under the single placeholder so that no ads are duplicated on a page.