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]

Originally Posted by tacklebox joe

y2k...i see how you can stack two ads but can you stack banners the same too? your hack works great i'm just figuring it out as a noob but i want the banners to align on the same line so to speak and not be under each other as on my site www.njfishreports.com

<div align="right"><!--@vbbanners:0@--></div>
<div align"left"><!--@vbbanners:0@--></div>
<div align="center"><!--@vbbanners:2@--></div>

The solution is in your example. If you need to show the same banner two times, you will have to use two different locations (and thus, two separate banners). Otherwise you may use the text field pand paste there your HTML code directly.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by GaryT

Well actually what I'm looking for is an add on that will rotate fairly large images on the article page with links for each image to a particular article. More like a slider widget I suppose.

It is not a carousel

[tacklebox joe]

thanks y2k...have another issue....i can see all the banners i place in position '0' however, when i plae another banner in a different position i.e. '2' '3' and etc they seem not to be showing up on the site...would you know why that would be?

also can you stack more than two banners across, say like four? i.e.

<!--@vbbanners:0@-->&nbsp;<!--@vbbanners:0@--><!--@vbbanners:0@-->&nbsp;<!--@vbbanners:0@-->

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by tacklebox joe

thanks y2k...have another issue....i can see all the banners i place in position '0' however, when i plae another banner in a different position i.e. '2' '3' and etc they seem not to be showing up on the site...would you know why that would be?

also can you stack more than two banners across, say like four? i.e.

<!--@vbbanners:0@-->&nbsp;<!--@vbbanners:0@--><!--@vbbanners:0@-->&nbsp;<!--@vbbanners:0@-->

Do you have banners for locations 2 and 3?

You may stack any number of banners, as long as you have that many banners in the database. All missing banners are discarded silently, as there is nothing like a default banner in case there are none available.

[bada_bing]

OK I have banged my head trying to get this working, I cant seam to get beyond the simpe display of the demo banner which was already created when I installed the mod.

I have uploaded all the files and imported the plugin twice and I cant seem to get the banner to show up anywhere.

I enabled the banner system and added this <!--@vbbanners:0@--> to the bottom of my navbar and refreshed my screen and I cant get it to show up. I also tried adding this <!--@vbbanners:0@--> to my signature and still wont show all I see is this <!--@vbbanners:0@-->

What am I doing wrong here I dont get how such a simple mod is getting the best of me, maybe long hours and short time to work on this.

Can someone please give me a hand and help me out here I would love to get this working as im trying to replace my old CMS with vbadvanced and one this that product lack is a good banner system and in dire need to get this working.

Thank You

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by bada_bing

OK I have banged my head trying to get this working, I cant seam to get beyond the simpe display of the demo banner which was already created when I installed the mod.

I have uploaded all the files and imported the plugin twice and I cant seem to get the banner to show up anywhere.

I enabled the banner system and added this <!--@vbbanners:0@--> to the bottom of my navbar and refreshed my screen and I cant get it to show up. I also tried adding this <!--@vbbanners:0@--> to my signature and still wont show all I see is this <!--@vbbanners:0@-->

What am I doing wrong here I dont get how such a simple mod is getting the best of me, maybe long hours and short time to work on this.

Can someone please give me a hand and help me out here I would love to get this working as im trying to replace my old CMS with vbadvanced and one this that product lack is a good banner system and in dire need to get this working.

Thank You

Do you have vbSEO? Did you read the manual about vbSEO?

[bada_bing]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Do you have vbSEO? Did you read the manual about vbSEO?

OK I got it working and yes it was a VBSEO issue which I resolved.

Can someone help explain how to get the banners to show up in photopost?

[tomshawk]

According to your updates section, the last vb up to is 4.0.2

Does this work with 4.2.0

Just asking as the adverts system in vb is not working for me.

Thanks

[alaska_av8r]

Did anyone ever find out why the start date and end date automatically increments the hourly valude as mentioned in post 2116.

Mine behaves the same way, I set a start time and end time and it will automatically increment to a later time as you save a setting.

If I set it to end at 0200 and click save, when I look at it again it shows 0400, if I change nothing and hit save it shows 0600.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by bada_bing

OK I got it working and yes it was a VBSEO issue which I resolved.

Can someone help explain how to get the banners to show up in photopost?

photopost does not call the final page rendering of vbulletin, thus banners would not get rendered in photopost.