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

[abouahmed]

nice job...
thanks...

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by inbrissy

I'm probably missing something, but in the options it says about Scheduled Tasks.. What filename do I put in for scheduling the emails to go out about the banner events?

I'm not sure what to put in the scheduled event for that.

Thanks

The product was predisposed to send email. It is a feature which has been asked, but is currently not implemented.

When it will be ready to use, the upgrade of a future release will add the task during installation.

[inbrissy]

ok cool..

thanks for that.. I thought i read something like that but then saw the email option and got confused (which isn't hard to do these days for me)

very nice Mod btw. Runs like a charm. I did accidentally delete the Google Ad that was there that would help you.. Can you send it to me to add back in?

Thanks again.

[Apolo.]

Hi,

I'm sorry to ask this, but how could you actually make the banners to rotate?

For instance, we have a place for a banner on the right side, and want to share that place among 8 advertisers, each one to be shown on a random basis.

Is this possible to do with this Rotating Banner System?

Thank you!

[Videx]

This one does rotate. But only with page refreshes, not automatically via AJAX.

[Apolo.]

Hi Videx,

Thanks for your reply.

Originally Posted by Videx

This one does rotate. But only with page refreshes, not automatically via AJAX.

Nop, it is not rotating. I've uploaded 2 banners and it is showing up always the first one, every time I refresh the page or load a different page.

Or perhaps am I doing anything wrong?

For the first banner, I did this:

Rotating Banner System - Manage Banners - New

then I enter the details and Save. The ID is 4

Then I go to the template and place this, where I want the banner to show up:

@vbbanners_vertical@

Then for the second banner I do exactly the same and the ID is 5, but this time I do not place the "@vbbanners_vertical@" because one is already there. Or should I put "@vbbanners_vertical@" twice on that template?

Thanks again!

[Videx]

Are you sure you uploaded all the files? Maybe try uploading them again.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Apolo.

Hi,

I'm sorry to ask this, but how could you actually make the banners to rotate?

For instance, we have a place for a banner on the right side, and want to share that place among 8 advertisers, each one to be shown on a random basis.

Is this possible to do with this Rotating Banner System?

Thank you!

They do rotate. The most common error is not to check the "vertical" option for vertical banners. So if you have 1 banner with the "vertical" option checked and 7 not, only one banner will show at the @vbbanners_vertical@ placeholder.

[Apolo.]

Thanks for your reply.

It seems that uploading the files again did the trick and it's finally rotating the banners.

By the way, there is only one Horizontal Placeholder: @vbbanners@

And one Vertical Placeholder: @vbbanners_vertical@

And I have 4 places to put banners: 2 at the top (horizontal), one side banner (vertical) and one at the bottom (horizontal).

If someone wants to have his banner to be shown only at the bottom, how can I configure RBS for this purpose? Because otherwise the banner might be displayed at both the top and the bottom randomly.

Thanks again!

[y2ksw]

It may be a future decision to add more placeholder types, but at the very moment there are only two available. If you have only banners of one kind (e.g. horizontal), you may use the vertical placeholder for banners at specific locations.