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

[oddmud]

Back on topic, Thanks Baxter btw..

I finally got the flash ad to look right in the ad_global_header2 location, was missing the <br>'s in there to bring it down below the navbar.

Is there anyway to reset the statistics on a certain ad?

Also where can I set the target="_self", so it doesn't pop up another tab when clicked?

[Kolbi]

Widht and height attribut for non flash banners should be implemented, too.

<img src="" alt="" width="" height="" />

and not

<img src="" alt="" width="" height="">

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by oddmud

Why will the <!--@vbbanners:2@--> not work inside the vBulletin Ad Manager?

That would be the best way to implement it wouldn't it? Then I can control it's location properly.

The CSS/float issue is because for some reason when I put it in the ad_global_header2 template it's not showing there, and it's not pulling the css properly from the additional.css. It for some reason is showing up in ad_global_header, and isn't listening to the css instructions.

If HTML comments and this placeholder are not working for you, you can change it in the options (followed by the templates). This argument has been discussed many, many times in this thread and is also handled in the help.

vbulletin's Ad manager adds a level of problems, unless you have rules which are not handled elsewhere. It is much easier just to use the plain templates.

I am unable to reply properly to HTML and CSS problems, since I'm not a designer.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Kolbi

Widht and height attribut for non flash banners should be implemented, too.

<img src="" alt="" width="" height="" />

and not

<img src="" alt="" width="" height="">

Due to a bug, Mozilla Firebug will show an img tag with no HTML complying closing tag:

Attachment 125640

although it is closed in the page source:

Attachment 125641

and in the plugin code:

Attachment 125642

As for the width and height, they are reccomended but still optional. I will see if I will implement this feature into the next release.

[Kolbi]

Yes you are right. First watched the firefox page source After that I looked at the real page source.


That would be great!

[oddmud]

Is there anyway to reset the statistics on a certain ad?

[Marty McFly]

Hello,

I installed this and went to add @vbbanners@ to my header file and it just posts the text "@vbbanners@" in the header and doesn't load any banners. What am I doing wrong?

[TheLastSuperman]

Originally Posted by Marty McFly

Hello,

I installed this and went to add @vbbanners@ to my header file and it just posts the text "@vbbanners@" in the header and doesn't load any banners. What am I doing wrong?

Try adding <-- and --> before and after then pasting example:

<--@vbbanners@-->

Reference this screenshot for more info:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/attachmen...3&d=1290115479

[Marty McFly]

Here's what I have setup:



This is how it comes out after adding <--@vbbanners@--> into my header template. I also tried just @vbbanners@ and it showed up in plain text too.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by oddmud

Is there anyway to reset the statistics on a certain ad?

By Query:

DELETE FROM rbs_hits WHERE bannerid=N

where N is the banner to reset.

You may use these criteria to filter: id, bannerid, userid, dateline, id, servername, referer.

In order to reset all stats, rather use:

TRUNCATE rbs_hits