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 Toorak Times

www.tooraktimes.com.au thanks Videx sorry to be so daft...just enquiring really if you reckon its good to go for 4.2.1...I have a 24yo developer hassling me, she can't figure the settings...guess I'll pull out the whip

If you send me an admin account via PM I'll get you a banner working

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Videx

I don't see "... /forum/rbs_banner.php ..." anywhere in the page source, so either "@vbbanners:0@" hasn't actually been added or all those existing banners are stomping over it? My first step if I was him would be to get rid of all existing ads before trying to get this mod working.

Toorak: Same thing I just said - telling us nothing but "it doesn't work" really doesn't enable anyone to do anything for you. At the very least give us a link and assure us plain vb ads are working and that you don't have any large mods installed like vbadvanced or xxx that might be interfering.

xxx==Right now I can't think of the name of that big one that seems to break everything.

rbs_banner.php would be there only if click tracking is enabled. The kind of banners I see, are exclusively AdSense ...

[Videx]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

rbs_banner.php would be there only if click tracking is enabled.

Interesting. Maybe that should be part of the troubleshooting process. "Make sure 'click tracking' is turned on for your test banner and then rbs_banner.php should appear in your page source."

[m13]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

I see some banners ... did you get it working?

Hi, no I didn't
First I remove all the banners and tried to put them whith the rotating system banner. But I could'n make it work, so I used the admincp/advertizing opcion to put the banner that you saw.

[Impromptu]

Hi all,

First of all, thanks for the developer for this great mod.

It works fine in most screens, however when the resolution gets smaller, my banner overlaps with my logo. My website is: www.supercoachscores.com. As you can see on most monitor resolution it's fine, however for older computers or mobile phones (in non-mobile format), it goes out of whack.

I tried using <div width=100% etc etc> rather than the absolute width in px, I then used in the banner css width at 55% instead of absolute value. Thus from my understanding, this should have converted to a lower px due to using percentages.

On my laptop, in IE, Chrome and Firefox, it looks all good, but when others look at it, it looks out of place.

Thanks in anticipation

Jay

[fuyunobara]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

Here, as an unofficial addon, you get the autorefreshing page (tested). It needs:

- a text editor;
- a refresh time of your choice (see metatag refresh in file, now at 10 seconds);
- a banner location (see placeholder in file, now at position 0);
- at least a banner for that location;
- a global target of a new page aka _blank (RBS options), else you jump into the iframe;
- a template modification for a 468x60 banner:

<iframe src="rbs_iframe.php" align="center" frameborder="0" height="60" width="468" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Please note: with smaller banners you get white borders, with larger than the iframe area, they are clipped.

it shunts my forum tab down a little is there any way to not have it do that

and it does this either way i code it when i shrink my screen or on smaller screen sizes
any way to stop it doing this?!

[clauz]

Hello and thanks for this great mod.
Anyway, I have a small problem on my 4.2.1 vBulletin forum: the attached images are covered by the banners like you can see bellow. This happen on IE9 and Chrome. On Firefox it is OK.


Can anyone help me on this problem?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by clauz

Hello and thanks for this great mod.
Anyway, I have a small problem on my 4.2.1 vBulletin forum: the attached images are covered by the banners like you can see bellow. This happen on IE9 and Chrome. On Firefox it is OK.


Can anyone help me on this problem?

Isn't this great?

What kind of banner is this? If it is a scripted banner, it may need adjusting the z-order. However I'm not a great help in CSS/HTML ...

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by fuyunobara

it shunts my forum tab down a little is there any way to not have it do that

and it does this either way i code it when i shrink my screen or on smaller screen sizes
any way to stop it doing this?!

Try a style attribute with "margin: 10px;"

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Impromptu

Hi all,

First of all, thanks for the developer for this great mod.

It works fine in most screens, however when the resolution gets smaller, my banner overlaps with my logo. My website is: www.supercoachscores.com. As you can see on most monitor resolution it's fine, however for older computers or mobile phones (in non-mobile format), it goes out of whack.

I tried using <div width=100% etc etc> rather than the absolute width in px, I then used in the banner css width at 55% instead of absolute value. Thus from my understanding, this should have converted to a lower px due to using percentages.

On my laptop, in IE, Chrome and Firefox, it looks all good, but when others look at it, it looks out of place.

Thanks in anticipation

Jay

Most probably you will have to create dedicated banners for mobile ... the high number of different formats and reduced HTML/CSS support on old devices can't be universally translated.