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

[ovidiuletu]

Hy,
I have a client who asks the following for his banner:
1. At this point the baner has Atribut ?nofollow? ? he wants to be removed the rel=?nofollow? from the link;

2. My banner has an internal link named: http://www.ciclism.ro/forums/rbs_banner.php?id=3 and he wants a direct link to http://www.veloteca.ro

Can you help me with this?
My website is www.ciclism.ro/forums

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Bacon Butty

Looks great. Is there any chance the placeholder can be placed after the first post in every thread, like;



... as detailed here

Put the placeholder in the template: ad_showthread_firstpost ... maybe within a div align center tag ...

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by ovidiuletu

Hy,
I have a client who asks the following for his banner:
1. At this point the baner has Atribut ?nofollow? ? he wants to be removed the rel=?nofollow? from the link;

2. My banner has an internal link named: http://www.ciclism.ro/forums/rbs_banner.php?id=3 and he wants a direct link to http://www.veloteca.ro

Can you help me with this?
My website is www.ciclism.ro/forums

1. Change the banner code accordingly to your wishes (plugin hook: global_complete, "Banner Insertion"). Please note that you have to reapply this change after each upgrade. Also, direct links to other sites without nofollow have a direct impact on your Google Site Rank (your page ranking decreases).
2. Uncheck the Click Tracking option (you can't have enabled click tracking and direct links in the same moment).

[Videx]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Put the placeholder in the template: ad_showthread_firstpost ... maybe within a div align center tag ...

Cool. For some odd reason, this position doesn't seem to be included in the vb advertising positions (?).

But it doesn't look too bad to put it in AdminCP>Advertising>Add New Ad>Page:Thread>First Post Content>

<div style="text-align:center;border:1px solid black"><!--@vbbanners:0@--></div>

I wonder if anyone has filed a bug report that the "After first post" is missing.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Videx

Cool. For some odd reason, this position doesn't seem to be included in the vb advertising positions (?).

But it doesn't look too bad to put it in AdminCP>Advertising>Add New Ad>Page:Thread>First Post Content>I wonder if anyone has filed a bug report that the "After first post" is missing.

The normal templates are filled and they do work. If not, probably you are encountering a style problem.

[Videx]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

The normal templates are filled and they do work. If not, probably you are encountering a style problem.

No, I only have the default style. Maybe I'm just not explaining it correctly. Take a look at the attachments and you'll see that when creating a new ad there are no locations listed within a thread except two. Both fairly useless, imho.

[stinger2]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

If this is a general rule and you are happy with changing the code a bit, you may add (hook: global_complete, "Banner Insertion"), on the very top:

if(THIS_SCRIPT == 'adv_index')
{

and, on the very bottom:

}

This way, the plugin code will run only when the portal pages are shown. However, it also keeps the placeholders unchanged in other pages, which may have undesireable side effects, if they are not in the HTML comment format. True vBAdvanced support would require more coding.

If some more users are interested in an additional feature for vBAdvanced support, this is the time to ask

thanks......this is a nice practical solution....

i usually do not modefy the board alot.........first because i forget the modification....second..would be very hard to make upgrades..........hehehe........as if i am going to upgrade to vb 4 with all my modifications.

thanks alot....nice and great hack

[Traxion]

I cant seem to get a banner to show up. I believe I have it installed correctly, made sure I added the correct code to the ad_navbar_below template and I have checked the HTML code and spelling but I cant get anything to show up anywhere. Any ideas?

Update: I kept messing a little more with this and found that it tries to place the default banner where I want it but doesnt show because of a javascript error from the google ads. I can verify this cause it displays on my smartphone but not on my desktop. Now when I try to create an entirely new banner and place in the same exact position I get nothing. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[anabolika]

Hi,

I can't seem to get it to work I'm running 4.0.2 , is it tested for this version? I've tried all placeholders in the forum block manager and I still see <!--@vbbanners:0@--> or <!--@vbbanners:0-->

Is there a way to check for errors?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Traxion

I cant seem to get a banner to show up. I believe I have it installed correctly, made sure I added the correct code to the ad_navbar_below template and I have checked the HTML code and spelling but I cant get anything to show up anywhere. Any ideas?

Update: I kept messing a little more with this and found that it tries to place the default banner where I want it but doesnt show because of a javascript error from the google ads. I can verify this cause it displays on my smartphone but not on my desktop. Now when I try to create an entirely new banner and place in the same exact position I get nothing. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Please try to show a standard image banner and disable the Google ads. Also check if your banner will show up in a normal HTML page