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

[Bulent Tekcan]

Anyway Dear y2ksw I made some works on 1 file. If you agreee you can put your product. Because now very useful I think. But please check the file, I tested many times it is working. Because I'm not coder but I'm a software engineer. I hope users happy with this. Only add Start and End Date table



Regards,

[y2ksw]

Many people cannot access phpmyadmin, and also dangeous also. I have add this table but how can I convert unix time to normal time ? Have you got any trick for this line

You do it with a query. Please see the MySQL documents for that.

Google search: mysql unix time
Result: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5...functions.html

[Bulent Tekcan]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

You do it with a query. Please see the MySQL documents for that.

Google search: mysql unix time
Result: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5...functions.html

I did it Please check https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....postcount=2792

Regards

[y2ksw]

Then, if you really must, add this line to the file 'admin/admin_rbs_banner_list.php' at line 153:

$SQL = str_replace('ORDER BY id', 'ORDER BY enddate', $SQL);

which replaces the normal order with ordering by the end date and time. This is a hack and there you go

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Bulent Tekcan

Anyway Dear y2ksw I made some works on 1 file. If you agreee you can put your product. Because now very useful I think. But please check the file, I tested many times it is working. Because I'm not coder but I'm a software engineer. I hope users happy with this. Only add Start and End Date table



Regards,

Ah I see ... we are becoming overactive in the same moment

[askandy]

Hi @y2k (mod developer),

Curious if we could get your help to further extend RBS to allow more ad placements?

We are currently using all 10 spots on our forum, primarily serving ads to desktop users.

Now we'd like to add some additional ad positions in our mobile forum template so we can serve ads to mobile visitors and get more exposure for our advertising partners.

We may need about 5 more ad positions.

Is this addition we can pay for?

Thanks!
M

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by askandy

Hi @y2k (mod developer),

Curious if we could get your help to further extend RBS to allow more ad placements?

We are currently using all 10 spots on our forum, primarily serving ads to desktop users.

Now we'd like to add some additional ad positions in our mobile forum template so we can serve ads to mobile visitors and get more exposure for our advertising partners.

We may need about 5 more ad positions.

Is this addition we can pay for?

Thanks!
M

It's already there and you may change it in the settings

[askandy]

Thank you!

[theksmith]

First, thanks for the excellent mod!

Click tracking is not working for me with vB 3.8, and version 2.3.4 of RBS.

I am using the "Image / Flash" field to point to a JPG, and the "URL" field to point to an external website - i.e I do NOT have a custom embedded script. The banner is active, enabled, and does NOT have Max Impressions or Max Clicks set.

The banner image is displayed correctly and the link does correctly point to the tracking page: /forum/rbs_banner.php?id=XXX&userid=YYY. The tracking PHP page also correctly redirects to my final destination URL.

However, the "Clicks" reading in the "Manage Banners" area and on the "Banner Statistics" pages both always shows 0, even after I have personally clicked on a banner. This happens for all 3 banners that I have running. The First/Last click statistics do show dates though!

Impressions: 231
Clicks: 0
CTR: 0%
First Click: Mon, 21-Nov-2016 09:33:57 GMT
Last Click: Tue, 22-Nov-2016 18:23:51 GMT

The only thing perhaps different about my use-case is that I am displaying the banner on a vBAdvanced CMS page which is in the root folder of my website but the vBulletin install is actually within a sub-folder called "/Forum". The banner image is also NOT beneath the "/Forum" path and therefore I had to use a fully qualified absolute URL to point to the image.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by theksmith

First, thanks for the excellent mod!

Click tracking is not working for me with vB 3.8, and version 2.3.4 of RBS.

I am using the "Image / Flash" field to point to a JPG, and the "URL" field to point to an external website - i.e I do NOT have a custom embedded script. The banner is active, enabled, and does NOT have Max Impressions or Max Clicks set.

The banner image is displayed correctly and the link does correctly point to the tracking page: /forum/rbs_banner.php?id=XXX&userid=YYY. The tracking PHP page also correctly redirects to my final destination URL.

However, the "Clicks" reading in the "Manage Banners" area and on the "Banner Statistics" pages both always shows 0, even after I have personally clicked on a banner. This happens for all 3 banners that I have running. The First/Last click statistics do show dates though!

Impressions: 231
Clicks: 0
CTR: 0%
First Click: Mon, 21-Nov-2016 09:33:57 GMT
Last Click: Tue, 22-Nov-2016 18:23:51 GMT

The only thing perhaps different about my use-case is that I am displaying the banner on a vBAdvanced CMS page which is in the root folder of my website but the vBulletin install is actually within a sub-folder called "/Forum". The banner image is also NOT beneath the "/Forum" path and therefore I had to use a fully qualified absolute URL to point to the image.

I know there are a few web applications which use a different path of page rendering, one of which is photopost. I these cases it is impossible to use the banner system via template changes, but you may try the unsupported iframe in-place rotating banners solution.

Could you please try the same banners on a standard forum page? If they work there, then it's definitively a problem with rendering the pages.