Advert Management

This is a script to allow you to manage the adverts on your forums, you can have any sort of advert you can imagine there is no actual limit with this hack to what it can be, javascript, flash, image, text and images.

You add adverts to a category or a forum or the whole board. If the category has child forums they will inherit the adverts as well as their own adverts if they have any.
Adverts can have a set exposure such as 10,000 views and once it has reached that it will stop.

It fills a variable called $advert which you just place in any template, such as the header, you can also use variables and replacements within the adverts, such as $bbuserinfo[userid] for the persons userid in a link within an advert.

Updated June 9th at 19:44 GMT

Added date limits and options for unlimited exposures.
To upgrade from an older version, reapply code in global.php, upload ads.php and run this sql query to alter the ads table you made.

[sql]ALTER TABLE `ads` ADD `time` INT(10) DEFAULT '0' NOT NULL;[/sql]

[sql]ALTER TABLE `ads` ADD `wholeforum` SMALLINT(1) DEFAULT '0' NOT NULL;[/sql]
If you already run that query though are still experiencing problems with the time always being January 1st run

[sql]ALTER TABLE `ads` CHANGE `time` `time` INT(10) DEFAULT '0' NOT NULL[/sql]

New features include showing the advert on the entire forum by using a radio button, some highlighting in the admin panel, italic name indicates the time period has ended and a bold name means the advert has met its quota for exposures.

You must chance RAND() to RAND(NOW()) if you have mysql 3.23.52 or above

Scott

[Parker Clack]

PPN:

Ok, I will see what you do. Thanks.

I added another row so that the actual banner would show up too.

Below the last </tr> I added

echo "<tr>";
echo "<td colspan='4' align='center'>$ads[advert]</td>";
echo "</tr>";

and I added the ability to reset the count on the advert to zero if you wanted by adding

// ###################### Start Reset #######################
if ($action=="reset") {

doformheader("ads","zero");
makehiddencode("adid",$adid);
maketableheader("Confirm reset");
makedescription("Are you sure you want to reset this advert");
doformfooter("Yes","",2,"No");

}

// ###################### Start Kill #######################
if ($HTTP_POST_VARS['action']=="zero") {

$ad = $DB_site->query("SELECT name FROM ads WHERE adid='$adid'");
$DB_site->query("UPDATE ads SET exposed=0 WHERE adid='$adid'");
echo "<p>Advert $ad[name] has been reset</p>";
$action="list";

}

and just link to reset.

Thanks again for a great hack. This is something that I thought should have been included with vBulletin from the start.

Parker

[scsa20]

Originally posted by PPN
Em its an advert

http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=advertisement

lol, dictionary.com, the only place where I go to for defantions

[Scott MacVicar]

Yep but that can cause problems showing the ad if it has alot of ads or if its javascript with \ in it as it would be stripped and could cause problems.
The reset thing i'll add to the release then.

[Scott MacVicar]

Uploads ads.php from the zip again to get the reset feature working on your board, you can use this to reset your ad hits to start exposures at 0 again.

[Velocd]

advert eh? you're the first person I have met abbreviate advertisements into advert, instead of plainly referring to it as an ad.

nonetheless, excellent hack

[Sparkz]

If that is the case, you need to get out more, Velocd :P

I think advert occurs pretty commonly...

[duke]

This is a great

sugestion
1. what if you want to have two different rotatons one at top and obe at bottom you would need to variable's is that a posability to add.

2. there should be a way to set the banner to unlimited exposers

3. rotate the ad in all or one forum to beable to choose two or three forums right now it is a little limited to all of one catagory or one forum

[Neo]

Would you post a pic of what it looks like from the users end?

[Parker Clack]

neo:

The upper right hand banner is what the enduser will see.

[Floris]

It works very nice I expected to find instructions for many files, but this was very quick and easy. Great hack!

One little tweak me and my users want, is to exclude the showthread and postreply pages. Or at least an option for the admin to also show on those pages, or not.

Another little tweak is the option to show certain banners for unlimited time.