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

[odln018]

Can this be used to replace a header?

[MaR?]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

......If yes, do you have enough banners in the database to show? Remember that no banner is shown more than once on a single page.

Thanks!! :up:

So, I have a Question now...

I using this mod to show banner of sub-forums on Navbar but I want also use this mod to have banners (comercial ones) under first post... Is any way to divide "groups" of banner to show in different places? (I mean for example: "@vbbanners@" and "@vbcomercialbanners@ "can you helpme?... thank you again!!

Edit: Nevermine!!, Im using "@vbbanners_vertical@" for comercial ones!!!

This mod rules!!

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by odln018

Can this be used to replace a header?

I haven't tried yet ... it may work.

[pauldack]

Excellent mod!. I'm using on 6 of my forums.

[djbaxter]

Installed and working for vBulletin 3.82.

This can be used in combination with the new built-in vBulletin ad templates. I just added @vbbanners@ in one of the templates so that I get rotating banners instead of a single fixed ad.

[djbaxter]

I see an item titled "Settings" at the bottom of the ACP menu item list under "Rotating Banners System". However, when I click on that item, all I get is a blank page.

The rest of this add-on seems to work pretty well.

What would be nice would be an option to have different sets of ads defined to rotate in different places. For example, I use a small banner in the logo header area but I also have a leaderboard banner in above the stats. I see that someone has suggested you can use the "vertical" banners and just not make them vertical, but it would be nice to expand the add-on to explicitly alloow this.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

I see an item titled "Settings" at the bottom of the ACP menu item list under "Rotating Banners System". However, when I click on that item, all I get is a blank page.

This is an issue which appears on a few systems but until now I don't know why, nor how to reproduce. It seems to depend on the & character in XML files and how servers read. In any case, those settings may be accessed also from the vBulletin settings list (bottom). This link was intended as a shortcut.

The rest of this add-on seems to work pretty well.

What would be nice would be an option to have different sets of ads defined to rotate in different places. For example, I use a small banner in the logo header area but I also have a leaderboard banner in above the stats. I see that someone has suggested you can use the "vertical" banners and just not make them vertical, but it would be nice to expand the add-on to explicitly alloow this.

The problem with the number of Ad Sets is mainly the way how placeholders are replaced. If I would allow for, let's say 10 Ad Sets, tomorrow promptly there will be somebody who wants 11, 20 or 100. The way how Ad Sets are handled, will not allow for an unlimited number, unless to make the product heavy, slow and difficult to manage. Do we really want this?

How many places do we need? Would 10 different places be fine? Definitely? More than 10 places would make the settings overcrowded...

[1adam12]

Hi,
I've got this working fine under 3.82 and just got it to work with swf files (have to put all the bits in the forum root for some reason, didn't like referencing a subfolder path).

But, it's doesn't seem to be tracking clicks on swf's. Ideas? Thanks!

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by 1adam12

Hi,
I've got this working fine under 3.82 and just got it to work with swf files (have to put all the bits in the forum root for some reason, didn't like referencing a subfolder path).

But, it's doesn't seem to be tracking clicks on swf's. Ideas? Thanks!

Click tracking works only with images.

I tried to use a table with a SWF background and a transparent button as foreground, but for some undefined reason it would not work at all, or only on some browsers and others not. So I gave up to wrap a click tracker around other items than just plain images... Any ideas are welcome, though

[Jaxel]

I am unable to get google adsense to work with this...

PHP Code:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-2437104458257480";
/* 8WayRun.Com */
google_ad_slot = "3270884163";
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script> 


http://www.8wayrun.com/index.php

With IE it gives me an error, with Firefox, it just gives me a blank spot.

*EDIT* sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.