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

[fxdigi-cash]

BTW, where do I find the installing instructions?

what I did was uploading the files to my vb folder like: whatever inside upload folder uploaded to my vb folder. And then the addon folder to the vb root folder where it appears in the main folders' tree... is that correct?

[fxdigi-cash]

OK after installing all versions one by one, the mod works great. Thanks a lot.

[Gripi]

hi..

i hope in the next release, you put "Expired Time" list inside the banner list menu.

right now banner list menu already have "ID, Name, Position, Impressions, Clicks"

the purpose is, we dont need to open one by one just to check when the banner time expired.

thanks alot for this great addon

[licensinglinks]

I have recently installed Google AdSense. I notice that the impressions displayed in my AdSense account are significantly less (10 TIMES LESS!!!!) than the impressions the RBS is reporting.

In short, AdSense tells me I've only served a total of 128,000 ad impressions, but RBS tells me that I've delivered way over ONE MILLION ad impressions in total.

What's going on here, and how do I fix it??? Is RBS counting bots or something?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by fxdigi-cash

BTW, where do I find the installing instructions?

what I did was uploading the files to my vb folder like: whatever inside upload folder uploaded to my vb folder. And then the addon folder to the vb root folder where it appears in the main folders' tree... is that correct?

The addon is an addon which contains special (and unsupported features) files normally not needed and thus not installed

The installation instructions are contained in the PDF file, which also informs about the features of this product.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by licensinglinks

I have recently installed Google AdSense. I notice that the impressions displayed in my AdSense account are significantly less (10 TIMES LESS!!!!) than the impressions the RBS is reporting.

In short, AdSense tells me I've only served a total of 128,000 ad impressions, but RBS tells me that I've delivered way over ONE MILLION ad impressions in total.

What's going on here, and how do I fix it??? Is RBS counting bots or something?

There is no need to fix it. The Google AdSense counts are at most approximate, and will not consider some devices. Please make sure you understand what Google AdSense does and what not. It does not do quite a lot

RBS counts also half viewed pages where people are in too much hurry to wait and counts also all visits from spiders which eventually show banners. Google does exclude its own visits. So if your site is visited from more spiders than real visitors, the counts may seem exaggerated, but in fact, they are precise as a swiss clock.

[zackw]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

This is a server issue, where the database server runs on a different time or time zone than the web server. Your hosting provider should really use NTP in order to keep the date/time aligned and use the same time zone on all servers.

We use this:

# cat /etc/cron.d/ntpdate
0    1    *    *    *    root    ntpdate pool.ntp.org > /dev/null 2>&1

This makes sense, buy my server hosts both the MySQL and the forum. I mean, it's the same server, same user. I have a dedicated server for the forum and database.

Do I need to change the timezone in vBulletin itself, or in the MySQL server itself? Or in Apache? Or do I have to change settings in all of them to the same setting?

Thanks!

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by zackw

This makes sense, buy my server hosts both the MySQL and the forum. I mean, it's the same server, same user. I have a dedicated server for the forum and database.

Do I need to change the timezone in vBulletin itself, or in the MySQL server itself? Or in Apache? Or do I have to change settings in all of them to the same setting?

Thanks!

It needs the MySQL Server and the server itself to run on the same timezone. Normally, this is automatic. If you have problems with DST or if the visitor time differs from your personal settings, you need to set the timezone of vbulletin, until these times match. If you have server access, the visitor time should match the date/time of the server's date command of the user who runs Apache.

Personally, I leave the DST settings of vbulletin alone (disabled), but change twice a year its timezone. Noticeably, the times in the MySQL records differ from the times I see in the Banner's ACP, but the banners show and hide correctly, and don't shift while saving.

[dreamygirl]

Thanks for this mod!

I have VB 4.2 with VBSEO.

When I put @vbbanners:0@ in my template, my test banner shows perfectly.

When I put @vbbanners:%d@ in my template, I see no banner, only the text is shown back to me: @vbbanners:%d@

Do you have advice to make %d work?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by dreamygirl

Thanks for this mod!

I have VB 4.2 with VBSEO.

When I put @vbbanners:0@ in my template, my test banner shows perfectly.

When I put @vbbanners:%d@ in my template, I see no banner, only the text is shown back to me: @vbbanners:%d@

Do you have advice to make %d work?

You have to use @vbbanners:0@ ... @vbbanners:9@ in your templates. %d is the number (0-9) in the placeholder (options).