Geek Advertising Banner system RC1

HowdA All.

From the makers of Hydrogen comes the latest mack - GAB (Geek Advertising Banners).

This has come about by needing an advertising system that no other hack seemed to totally fulfill. Personally - I really didnt want to burden myself with supporting another hack - but I felt it was significantly better than other hack systems out there so I thought many would be able to benefit from it.

Whats so freaking cool about it?

1- use flash, normal, text based (google adsense) or rotating banners
2- Decide which scripts run the banners
3- Define which forums run the banners
4- define which usergroups can turn off the banners
5- Make ads stop at x amount of hits
6- Make ads stop at x amount of views
7- Make ads start/stop at certain times
8- track views and/or hits
9- Wipes your bum

Why am I releasing this now? It seems to be hip and trendy to release Banner hacks. In all reality - this has been a very long work in progress that is finally rounding the finsihing stages. The current RC pacakge is considered complete except for the show stats segment (its recording stats, but you cant browse them easily yet).

LIke with any hack (especially a Beta) back up you DB and files needing change (global.php,admincp/index.php).

Known issues:

• Flash ads can not appear on same page as a rotating banner ad.
• After installing for the first time, you will most likely need to edit a phrase (any phrase) and click save to rebuild phrases
• Flash banners hide drop down menus!!! Be careful where you put them or dont use them!

Basic install instructions:

• Upload all files to relevant locations
• chmod the gab and gish folders to 777 (or change the owner of the folders to whatever account your PHP process runs under).
• Run the gab_install.php file in your admincp folder.
• Follow the steps.
• On the file changes - pay close attention to see if certain changes couldnt be made. If any changes could not be made, you need to manually make those changes.
• When complete, move changed files from gish/gab/rc1.0 to their respective locations
• Ad a new cron job to run daily (file: GAB_cron_daily.php)
• Edit each gab category to include the forums you want the ads to appear in.
• Ad $GAB_ads[x] to your templates where ever you want ads to appear (x represents the ad number depending on how many ads are set to run on that script. $GAB_ads[0] is the first ad block, $GAB_ads[1] would be the second, etc...)
• Read The Freaking README!!!!!!!

Quick Upgrade instructions

For users of GAB Beta 2, uninstall it and then install this version. In all reality, you could just revert the file changes and delete the GAB_ tables from yur DB (heck, you dont even need to do that).

To upgrade from RC1.5 to RC1.6, just replace existing files with the latest from the downloaded package and run the template portion of the installer (you can skip the rest of the install steps). You may have to revert your GUSH_main and GUSH_ad_row

Donations

I have never asked for donations for any of the macks I have done - however since I have spent well over 60 hours coding this - I thought I would stick my neck out there. If you like my mack, it brings you some money and you want to keep my fridge stocked with beer and Cheetos, then feel free to drop some cash in my paypal account: geek@thenailgeek.com
If youre having difficulty keeping beer in the fridge yourself - fill yours before you fill mine.
If you think the mack sucks, or youre just a tight git then please dont bother

nJoy

[Hanif]

Got it figured nice one geek,

one thing that I dont understand is I want two adds to appear on my page however,

I'm following your instructions as per :

"For instance, lets say you had GAB configured to produce 2 ads on a page (one at the top and one at the bottom)... You could then place $GAB_ads[0] in your navbar template and $GAB_ads[1] in your footer template.
The more ads you have configured in your settings, the higher $GAB_ads will go. That means you could theoretically have 9,999+ ads on a single page (you would just need to have $GAB_ads[9998] somewhere ;-)"

yet only one fails to load. And that is at the top of the Navbar...

Would idelly like one to have at the bottom of the footer as well, yet placed an entery as $GAB_ads[1] in the footer, yet no joy.

Any ideas?

Kind regards,

Hanif

[The Geek]

Originally Posted by Hanif

Got it figured nice one geek,

one thing that I dont understand is I want two adds to appear on my page however,

I'm following your instructions as per :

"For instance, lets say you had GAB configured to produce 2 ads on a page (one at the top and one at the bottom)... You could then place $GAB_ads[0] in your navbar template and $GAB_ads[1] in your footer template.
The more ads you have configured in your settings, the higher $GAB_ads will go. That means you could theoretically have 9,999+ ads on a single page (you would just need to have $GAB_ads[9998] somewhere ;-)"

yet only one fails to load. And that is at the top of the Navbar...

Would idelly like one to have at the bottom of the footer as well, yet placed an entery as $GAB_ads[1] in the footer, yet no joy.

Any ideas?

Kind regards,

Hanif

I assume all of your scripts have 'use master' ticked?

If so, make sure that the master script has 2 ad entries in it. All you have to do is click scripts->Master

There will be 1 block per ad. If you want more, click the add new button and configure appropriately

[Hanif]

Geek, got an error, is this related to the ads???

Database error in vBulletin 3.0.7:

Invalid SQL: SELECT ad.id,ad.url, ad.img imgpath,c.track_views, c.track_hits, ad.max_views, ad.width, ad.height, ad.views, ad.template, ad.frequency,
c.template cat_template
FROM vb3_GAB_ads ad
INNER JOIN vb3_GAB_cats c ON ad.catid=c.id
WHERE ((ad.startdate<1) or (ad.startdate<1120084106)) and ((ad.enddate<1) or (ad.enddate>1120084106))
AND (forumid = 15)
AND c.scripts like '%,forumdisplay,%' AND ad.id IN (-1,4,7) ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 6
mysql error: Unknown column 'forumid' in 'where clause'

mysql error number: 1054

Date: Wednesday 29th of June 2005 11:28:26 PM
Script: http://www.muslimprofessionals.org.u...splay.php?f=15
Referer: http://www.muslimprofessionals.org.uk/forums/index.php?
Username:
IP Address: 81

Any ideas????

Kind regards,

Hanif

[Hanif]

I think I figured it out Geek but need your thoughts on this...

I went in to Master to say I want two adverts to be displayed..so I clicked on Add and had two entries displayed.

I also specified that 2 banners in the ad to be displayed.

Once I clicked on save, go to the forum home page and voila ! I can see two adverts on the home page, very neat !!!

Yet if I go into any of the forums then it comes up with that previous sql error.

I thus went back and reverted to previous settings and only have one add displayed. And the error message goes.

I'm sure it's something trivial.

Must say very impressed with it.

Kind regards,

Hanif

[Hanif]

Last one for tonight I hope

Entered a URL to direct users on how to learn more about advertising does not work for me, shows up advertising.php even though a value is present that differs from advertising.php

I like it

Hanif

[Reeve of shinra]

ITs looking good. I'm gonna install anyway but whats the typical query count?

[The Geek]

Hanif - I think you have a previous package. Download the latest and overwrtie your files (I stumbled across that error shortly after I upoaded the first RC1 and am pretty sure I fixed it then).

Reeve - That totally depends on how you have it configured.
Text ads (i.e. adsense)=0 queries
1 static banner on a page with no tracking =1 query
More than 1 image/flash banner on a page with no tracking=2 queries
If any of the banners on the page require impression tracking then there is a minimum of an additional query per page. This is per banner that requires the impression tracking however there is a throttle level that dictates the maximum number of queries are made from impressions. For example, if you have 3 banners on a page that you are requiring impression tracking on and your throttle is set to a number less than 3, then it rolls up those queries into 1 to be unpacked at a later stage by the cron job.

Kind of complex, but all in the name of customization

[Hanif]

Hanif - I think you have a previous package. Download the latest and overwrtie your files (I stumbled across that error shortly after I upoaded the first RC1 and am pretty sure I fixed it then).

Geek donwloaded the latest package and overwrote my files.

I dont need to run the installer again do I ? If not when I click on want to advertise with us that opens up a blank page.

Also, I noticed another bug...just sometimes, the ads wont load all together you have to do a refresh of the page and then an add pops up. This I think is an intermittent problem, I've been trying to replicate it but its like a hit or miss.

Otherwise no other bugs or issues found as of today. Mu users are well impressed

Look forward to your thoughts.

Kind regards,

Hanif

[Hanif]

As discussed Geek, the attached image to the associated error message where sometimes, the ads dont load up.

Very strange. Can't figure it out.

Kind regards,

Hanif

[The Geek]

Looks like an erroneous entry (i.e. an uncategorized, empty banner entry). If you could pm me an admincp account, I will look into it for you.