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

[Paul.]

Originally Posted by addamroy

That's why they say you should backup your database and files prior to installing new modifications Just sayin...

Delete the files you uploaded via FTP and delete the tables from your database created by the addon, that's a start.

Yes, thanks. They have been removed.
I get confused with the whole backing up thing.. how long does it take and is it difficult?
I didn't get to see the email errors until today when they were sent to me from a different email.

Originally Posted by Videx

Even if some terrible error is preventing the forum from loading, you should still be able to get to the Admin Control Panel as it doesn't display banners.
http://myforum.com/forum/admincp/index.php

I can not get on to it, but I have a feeling I could before the hosting company did something that took down all three of the forums we have.

I'm not sure why it happened. Pity really!
Just waiting on them to check it now and see what the story is.

[addamroy]

Originally Posted by Paul.

Yes, thanks. They have been removed.
I get confused with the whole backing up thing.. how long does it take and is it difficult?
I didn't get to see the email errors until today when they were sent to me from a different email.

backing up is VERY important. in my opinion if you're a webmaster small or large getting used to creating backups is one of the first things you should learn.

essentially when you do a backup, all you're doing is downloading your website files to your computer, and downloading your website database to your computer.

You can download your site's files/folders via FTP, I use filezilla.

You can download your site's database via your PhpMyAdmin on your sever, select the database associated with your forum and export it.

Hope that helps, there's plenty of info regarding how to do a backup scattered throughout this forum and on the net, get in the habit. Create a folder on your harddrive just for backups and keep a copy of everything you have online, offline. that's just my .02 cents.

[Paul.]

I'll learn that and get in the habit of it.. how long does it take to do, on average?

( in response to the post after this; Sorry @ Videx.. I did actually think of that when I came to check on this thread. My bad!

[Videx]

This is not really the thread to be discussing backup strategies. Do a search here and at vb.com and you'll find a lot of things. On my shared server, I do a full website backup monthly via cpanel, download it overnight, then put it on one of two removable hard drives which are swapped out alternately and one is always kept off-premises.

I backup my db daily using a cron php script, and using DOS batch files I automatically download those every day at noon.

It takes me a minute to log into cpanel, and again to FTP, but averaged out I doubt it comes to a second per day.

[webmaster74]

Originally Posted by webmaster74

grazzie mille y2ksw!

the mod is just great. I installed it and everybody on my site will love it surely.

I only regret that I can't use specific paramteres with the links, such as rel=nofollow

ciao!

y2ksw?

What do you think guys?

You don't want to pass all of your PR juice to advertisers, do you?

[Videx]

Originally Posted by webmaster74

y2ksw?

What do you think guys?

You don't want to pass all of your PR juice to advertisers, do you?

We only have a few paid sponsors at any given moment, and one of the few things we can offer them is to raise their rankings by appearing on our busy site. I sure wouldn't want to try to cut off the search engines from their ads with nofollow.

[webmaster74]

Originally Posted by Videx

We only have a few paid sponsors at any given moment, and one of the few things we can offer them is to raise their rankings by appearing on our busy site. I sure wouldn't want to try to cut off the search engines from their ads with nofollow.

I respect your opinion Videx but beg to differ.

My advertisers paid to display their banners on my site, and they get that.

I don't want to lose my PR to them by providing them with links on every single page

[webmaster74]

is this mod still supported?

[addamroy]

click tracking doesn't seem to be working.

running 4.0.7

The link redirect works, the impression is counted, however no clicks are shown in the banner statistics.

[Dragonsys]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Here, as an unofficial addon, you get the autorefreshing page (tested). It needs:

- a text editor;
- a refresh time of your choice (see metatag refresh in file, now at 10 seconds);
- a banner location (see placeholder in file, now at position 0);
- at least a banner for that location;
- a global target of a new page aka _blank (RBS options), else you jump into the iframe;
- a template modification for a 468x60 banner:

<iframe src="rbs_iframe.php" align="center" frameborder="0" height="60" width="468" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Please note: with smaller banners you get white borders, with larger than the iframe area, they are clipped.

Would it be possible to do this with ajax instead of using an iframe?