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

[nolimitreef]

Ok, I'm an idiot I knew this.... need to start getting some sleep and not staying up until 6am... I do apologize for the duh, question.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by nolimitreef

Ok, I'm an idiot I knew this.... need to start getting some sleep and not staying up until 6am... I do apologize for the duh, question.

no worries, we are good (me included) to throw a day's work for 5 minutes of madness

[INPowerZ]

Can it be used just as a header for a forums?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by INPowerZ

Can it be used just as a header for a forums?

As fas as I know, it is not possible to inject code into the header, for example for rotating the header- or background image.

[blah100]

Does this provide the ability to only display an ad to a specific country, or is it not possible?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by blah100

Does this provide the ability to only display an ad to a specific country, or is it not possible?

Short answer: no
Long answer: If you have pages which are shown only to certain countries, you can show also banners only for those pages. But it depends on your page settings, not the banners themselves.

[blah100]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Short answer: no
Long answer: If you have pages which are shown only to certain countries, you can show also banners only for those pages. But it depends on your page settings, not the banners themselves.

How would I go about making pages only viewable to certain countries? Is it a IF conditional statement?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by blah100

How would I go about making pages only viewable to certain countries? Is it a IF conditional statement?

You would normally do this at the server side with GeoIP and/or browser User Agent/Language detection. Eventually you would split then the forum into language or country dependent subdomains which however refer to the same installation, for efficiency. And then you would address one or more categories which are normally hidden, respectively for the language dependent pages. It sounds difficult, but is pretty easy to achieve

[scottkoz20]

good morning - I am wondering if anyone has noticed an issue with reporting from this modification back to Google ad-sense.

for example, I am showing nearly 4.2 Million impressions for my top banner in the system in the last 2 weeks; however when I go to Ad-sense to check the same banner code, shows only around 650k impressions.

I have no reason to doubt that the application is adding more impressions since I have placed a banner on one of pages that I only have access to and the system is correctly counting the number of impressions. Part of this might just be my lack of knowledge of the communication between my forum and google.

And I'm not complaining about the traffic, I am just seeking further understanding. If there is a past post about this - kindly link me to this.

Thank you in advance,
Scott

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by scottkoz20

good morning - I am wondering if anyone has noticed an issue with reporting from this modification back to Google ad-sense.

for example, I am showing nearly 4.2 Million impressions for my top banner in the system in the last 2 weeks; however when I go to Ad-sense to check the same banner code, shows only around 650k impressions.

I have no reason to doubt that the application is adding more impressions since I have placed a banner on one of pages that I only have access to and the system is correctly counting the number of impressions. Part of this might just be my lack of knowledge of the communication between my forum and google.

And I'm not complaining about the traffic, I am just seeking further understanding. If there is a past post about this - kindly link me to this.

Thank you in advance,
Scott

As discussed earlier in this thread, Google counts hits only approximately and hits above 1000 per hour are eventually ignored. Also, devices which do not handle Javascript, such as spiders, some tablets and text-only browsers are not counted by Google.