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

[Melodym]

I am clueless
I install the module in the control panel. Set it to on to show the developer's ads but not sure where to put the code.
Does <!--@vbbanners:%d@--> goes somewhere, right?
I'm not good at this stuff.

[mackers8923]

Originally Posted by Melodym

I am clueless
I install the module in the control panel. Set it to on to show the developer's ads but not sure where to put the code.
Does <!--@vbbanners:%d@--> goes somewhere, right?
I'm not good at this stuff.

You need to follow the last few instructions given to me, find the template which is pre fixed ad_.... for the location you want your ads to appear copy the copy in there but edit the %d to the location where you have placed it i.e. <!--@vbbanners:0@--> for position 0 banners as per your list.

[Melodym]

That helps, Thanks :-)

I got it going below the nav bar but I'm not sure where to tell it to be centered.

[Melodym]

Wait, I got it centered. Woo hooo!!

[GarethBurrows]

Hi,

We have just kicked off a forum and want to get some banner adverts in place. A quick search has brought me to this page which seems to tick all the boxes for what we want.

We are running VB 4.2.0 on xampp on a Windows 2008 R2 server

Are there any issues that we need to be aware of? The current skin is Modern Blue from PureVB which limits slots to 1 top banner and 1 footer banner and we have at least 12 advertisers lined up already.

Regards

Gareth

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by zackw

Still looking for information on my issue:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....postcount=2116

Why does the start and stop times auto-increment by an hour every time the banner is saved? This doesn't seem like a proper feature, I want to set the hour and minutes exactly the way I want, it doesn't make sense for the times to change on their own.

Thoughts?

This is a server issue, where the database server runs on a different time or time zone than the web server. Your hosting provider should really use NTP in order to keep the date/time aligned and use the same time zone on all servers.

We use this:

# cat /etc/cron.d/ntpdate
0    1    *    *    *    root    ntpdate pool.ntp.org > /dev/null 2>&1

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by GarethBurrows

Hi,

We have just kicked off a forum and want to get some banner adverts in place. A quick search has brought me to this page which seems to tick all the boxes for what we want.

We are running VB 4.2.0 on xampp on a Windows 2008 R2 server

Are there any issues that we need to be aware of? The current skin is Modern Blue from PureVB which limits slots to 1 top banner and 1 footer banner and we have at least 12 advertisers lined up already.

Regards

Gareth

Just keep kickin'

Use one placeholder/location on top and footer and the 12 banners will rotate on that.

[fxdigi-cash]

I just installed the latest version of this mod on my vb.4.2, but get an error in the control panel says there is an error. The side menu disappear till I disable this mod...!!

any ideas??

Thanks in advance.

P.S: where do we place the Addon folder?? it could be the cause of this issue!

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by fxdigi-cash

I just installed the latest version of this mod on my vb.4.2, but get an error in the control panel says there is an error. The side menu disappear till I disable this mod...!!

any ideas??

Thanks in advance.

P.S: where do we place the Addon folder?? it could be the cause of this issue!

Please read the installing instructions. If you are new to vBulletin, you should first install other plugins and get used to the plugin system.

This product/plugin does nothing to your board, styles and whatsoever. After uploading make sure the uploaded files have the right permissions.

[fxdigi-cash]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Please read the installing instructions. If you are new to vBulletin, you should first install other plugins and get used to the plugin system.

This product/plugin does nothing to your board, styles and whatsoever. After uploading make sure the uploaded files have the right permissions.

Thanks mate for the comments.

I will try installing previous versions first and see how things go.

Thanks again.