Mini Mods - Daily Game - Posts a new flash game to your vBulletin every day

Daily Game posts a new flash game to your vBulletin once per day in a new thread. Daily Game will help your vBulletin by:

• Starting up conversations on slow days
• Increasing retention since users are playing on your forum
• Help you get links and improve SEO (flash games get a lot of links!)
• Make you money! Use your own ad code to display an ad while the flash game is loading. These pre-roll ads get very high eCPM!

Install time: 5 minutes
Installation difficulty: Easy
Demo: http://www.playedonline.com/forum/showthread.php?t=40

Updated to version 1.5 : No manual template modifications and title and content customization

Updated to version 2.1 : simple_xml support is no longer required, enabled bbcodes on the game thread, support for switched off boards.

Installation instructions

1. Upload add_daily_game.php to the vBulletin root directory
2. Import the product XML file (Plugins & Products -> Manage Products - > [Add/Import Product])
3. Configure the Daily Game settings under vBulletin Options -> vBulletin Options -> Daily Game:
   • Set ?Enabled? to Yes
   • Visit www.playedonline.com/register_vbulletin to register (input your forum's url and your email) and get a shared key for authentication.
   • Configure which userid will post the daily games (input 0 for guest)
   • Choose a forum for Daily Game
   • Customise the title (useful for non-English forums) or leave blank for default
   • Enable or disable description and instructions
   • Paste ad code (e.g. AdSense) to show a pre-roll ad before the game starts (optional, leave empty to show no ads)
   • Click the Test link you got in the registration e-mail to post a test daily game (you can delete the test post after you verify that it works)
   • You're done! A daily game will be posted on your forum every day at 3am EST.
4. Optional : if you switch off your vBulletin from time to time you can make sure the games are posted even if the board is off by making those small changes:
   • Add the following code to /includes/functions.php
     
     PHP Code:

     function endswith($string, $test) {
    $strlen = strlen($string);
    $testlen = strlen($test);
    if ($testlen > $strlen) return false;
    return substr_compare($string, $test, -$testlen) === 0;
} 

   • In global.php find the line
     
     PHP Code:

     if (!$vbulletin->options['bbactive'] AND THIS_SCRIPT != 'login') 

     and replace with
     
     PHP Code:

     if (!$vbulletin->options['bbactive'] AND THIS_SCRIPT != 'login' AND !endswith($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"], '/add_daily_game.php')) 


[DailyGame]

Hi all,

We have moved the time the games are posted 2 hours ahead to 5am

Best of luck,
Ilya

[realmr]

sorted out the prob thanks

[DailyGame]

We're thinking of adding a feature that will allow you to pick which categories of games you would like to receive (puzzle, strategy, etc...)

Would be great to get some feedback about this or ideas for other features from current and potential users.

Cheers,

Ilya

[Itchy Nips]

if you do that, then it would be nice for admins to be able to have separate forum categories for each game type. So someone could have a "puzzle forum" and a separate "strategy forum" and the the daily game gets posted automatically into the specified forum. This would make it easier for the forum's users to find games they like a bit quicker.

just an idea

[DailyGame]

Thanks for your suggestion!
I think this would make things a bit complicated to manage (creating several forums & configuring them), and then having to deal with uncategorized games ("Other")

Do you think enabling posting the category as part of the title is valuable?
We could also let the admin customize the title's template with the category (similar to what we have today with the game's name and date)

This would create titles like "Daily game 29 Jul - Bloons [Arcade]" or
"A new Arcade game - Bloons" etc.
How does that sound?

[DailyGame]

Hi all,
Just added the option to include the game's category (puzzle, sports etc) in the title

Cheers!

[MagicThemeParks]

Aha! Found the mod conflicting with this mod! :up:

It was the Global Tag Cloud mod here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=177429

It was also causing a conflict with my automatic thread tagger mod. So, I got two fixes in one

My members are back and enjoying the daily games!

[Cindyl10]

I must have done something wrong...my test didn't work... I got this error message:

Exception : undefined method `string' for #

When I registered, it asked for the link to the forum which I assumed meant to the forum I wanted the games posted in, so I gave it that link which is:
http://www.fresh-hope.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=86

Other then that, I've uploaded everything to where it belongs and configured everything so I'm not sure what could have gone wrong...

Oh, I didn't put in an Adsense Code as I don't have one yet and am not sure I want ads on the board...that didn't appear to be mandatory though... I really don't know anything about adsense so I'm a little concerned about signing up for it... If you have to have it for this, will they only put ads in that one forum or will they put them everywhere?

Can someone help me? Thanks

[Cindyl10]

Never mind, thanks it's working now!!!

[angeljs]

Hi, I love the idea of this mod as my forums are primarily about gaming. However, when I try the test link I receive the following error messages:

An error occured : Sending to http://www.simfansuk.com/forum/ (ID: 2553) ->
Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array in [path]/includes/init.php(304) : eval()'d code on line 614

Unable to add cookies, header already sent.
File: /home/******/public_html/forum/includes/class_core.php
Line: 3283