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

[y2ksw]

In addition to what I said before, the RTC may or may not store the system time in UTC. I have several computers which run alternating Windows and Linux, and on a few I had to use specific flags in Linux in order to keep the time always the same between switching OS. Since it is a hardware setting, there is no guarantee that one setting working on one computer will do also on another.

[Bulent Tekcan]

I tested now here is the result

mysql> SELECT NOW(), UTC_TIMESTAMP();
+---------------------+---------------------+
| NOW() | UTC_TIMESTAMP() |
+---------------------+---------------------+
| 2016-09-30 17:12:12 | 2016-09-30 14:12:12 |
+---------------------+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

It is not 10 hour different

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Bulent Tekcan

I tested now here is the result

mysql> SELECT NOW(), UTC_TIMESTAMP();
+---------------------+---------------------+
| NOW() | UTC_TIMESTAMP() |
+---------------------+---------------------+
| 2016-09-30 17:12:12 | 2016-09-30 14:12:12 |
+---------------------+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)


It is not 10 hour different

As for you question (before you edited this one), the server cron jobs usually execute at UTC, but it depends also on how the time is stored in RTC. On my backup server, time in RTC is stored in local time, and thus runs at local time. The servers where I have the hosting running, store the RTC time in UTC, and run at UTC, while the "apache" user runs in Europe/Rome timezone and thus, vbulletin cron runs at that time. This timezone is also default for the mysql users, but my vary if the system administrator wishes.

This classic example makes clear that things can become pretty complex and explains also why vbulletin stores the current time in the constant TIMENOW, relative to the "apache" user. This variable may be then adjusted to specific needs, but this plugin does nothing to it, because it cannot make a choice.

So eventually I could add a parameter in the settings which allows you to change this offset manually, but then there will be quite some user having problems with their timing at another level, which is impossible to guess.

As long as there is no such parameter, there is no need for me to solve server side issues. If there was, I would have every day 10 questions how to make timing work properly, which I can't answer, because every server setting is different.

Taking all possible variables, there are 1*2*3*4=24 legit settings (server, mysql, apache, vbulletin) which would directly influence the behavior of any given setting at one place or another.

I hope I have answered your question and the final, short reply is: "There will be no option to set the offset manually"

[Bulent Tekcan]

Finaly problem solved My php.ini timezone was set Los Angeles time zone. It seems 10 hour different from here. Now I set Europe/Istanbul and problem gone

Thanks for your support

Regards

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Bulent Tekcan

Finaly problem solved My php.ini timezone was set Los Angeles time zone. It seems 10 hour different from here. Now I set Europe/Istanbul and problem gone

Thanks for your support

Regards

Oh, that adds another element to the formula

Thank you for working out the problem, which will be helpful for all other users who have asked this question!

[Bulent Tekcan]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Oh, that adds another element to the formula

Thank you for working out the problem, which will be helpful for all other users who have asked this question!

Yes :up:

I have other question about the List screen. Is it possible to add start and end time to column like my attachment ? Because I cannot see start and end time in list. If I have 50 banners I'll be crazy



Regards

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Bulent Tekcan

Yes :up:

I have other question about the List screen. Is it possible to add start and end time to column like my attachment ? Because I cannot see start and end time in list. If I have 50 banners I'll be crazy



Regards

Please use phpmyadmin for extended listings

[rhody401]

Thanks for posting this. Mine always adjusts it one hour every time I re-save a setting in this mod, and fixing it in the php file sounds like the perfect fix Great! Love this code add on

[Bulent Tekcan]

Originally Posted by rhody401

Thanks for posting this. Mine always adjusts it one hour every time I re-save a setting in this mod, and fixing it in the php file sounds like the perfect fix Great! Love this code add on

Yes, this is the trick :up: but why this product detect php default time I don't understand

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Bulent Tekcan

Yes, this is the trick :up: but why this product detect php default time I don't understand

It doesn't, it takes what it gets