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

[Rafa-el]

This is one of my favorites mods

Thanks for release it!

[Lord Singo]

Some of my banners display. Others don't. I have 7 of ten banners displaying. The others rotate but display a blank, white placeholder where the banner should be. The banners not displaying are no different to the others. All the banners are same size and range from 26KB to78KB (the ones displaying are not necessarily smaller than the others).

This is a great mod but the blank banners are frustrating. Any ideas?

I've added two screenshots to illustrate.

[reefcity]

Same issue here, the banner just come and go as they please not hardly displaying.
Is there any way to get this fixed.

[ryansmith]

This may have been addressed before, so please excuse me if I missed it, but...

Is there any way to put a timer in so that there's an option to rotate these banners every X seconds? For instance, if I put 2 banners in Position 0, can I make them rotate back and forth every 20 seconds without having to reload the page? I used to have a Javascript banner rotater but it would be so nice if this mod could do something similar.

Thanks.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Lord Singo

Some of my banners display. Others don't. I have 7 of ten banners displaying. The others rotate but display a blank, white placeholder where the banner should be. The banners not displaying are no different to the others. All the banners are same size and range from 26KB to78KB (the ones displaying are not necessarily smaller than the others).

This is a great mod but the blank banners are frustrating. Any ideas?

I've added two screenshots to illustrate.

Originally Posted by reefcity

Same issue here, the banner just come and go as they please not hardly displaying.
Is there any way to get this fixed.

Most probably you have external banner sources which fail to load and thus result in a white space. This happens for example with Google AdSense, if you have failed to insert correctly the scripts, but also with flash, if you haven't upgraded your browser Flash plugins.

Please make sure your banners will load, for example creating a blank static HTML including the banner code (as suggested in the help files). Anything you can't load normally, can't be loaded by the banner rotator either

If you have intermittent problems with one banner, try to wrap them differently. HTML is a pretty difficult programming language with a lot of alternate comaptibility issues, some of which may or may not work with one or another browser.

[cam2]

I am having issues with this also. I'm sure it's my fault. I have vBSEO installed and have the white spaces turned off.

I have been trying for hours to get this thing going. Every time I select a forum to show the banner in it does not show up.

I am using vB 4.0.8

Any help would be appreciated.

[Apolo.]

Disable all plugins you may have in place and then try again. If it works, then you will be able to find out which is the one causing you that issue.

If it still doesn't work... well... perhaps you may try a full vBulletin reinstall?

[cam2]

Yep, did that. No way I can do another install. Those are the only options?

[Apolo.]

Originally Posted by Scott Gerdes

Yep, did that. No way I can do another install. Those are the only options?

Did you do this?

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Please make sure your banners will load, for example creating a blank static HTML including the banner code (as suggested in the help files). Anything you can't load normally, can't be loaded by the banner rotator either

[cam2]

Tried that too.

The code is there but not showing on my test page.