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

[Jacko]

hmmmm i am missing some phrases, but i manually checked and there in the phrase manager??!

any help? im on 3.0.7 and no other hacks installed apart from vbadvanced.

[Koutaru]

Rebuild your phrases by just saving one of them again in the admin CP

[007]

How soon until the paid banner version is up and working? That sounds like it will make this hack the best banner hack yet by far! Thanks for all the cool stuff!

[The Geek]

tough to say - its making good progress - but it is A LOT of coding. I am also going to be out of comission the back end of next week for a good week or two. So I would bank on sometime around then.

Or maybe sooner

[007]

Very cool. Will your hack support multiple banner spots? What I mean by that is can you specify different ads to be say, on the top of a page, and others on the bottom, in two different rotations? It would be cool to have a membership paid rotation, and then just normal ads that we pick. Maybe this is how it will work already? Either way it sounds awesome. I can't wait!

[The Geek]

Originally Posted by 006

Very cool. Will your hack support multiple banner spots? What I mean by that is can you specify different ads to be say, on the top of a page, and others on the bottom, in two different rotations? It would be cool to have a membership paid rotation, and then just normal ads that we pick. Maybe this is how it will work already? Either way it sounds awesome. I can't wait!

It already supports multiple ads. Overfolwed ads go to ad1, ad2, ad3 etc...

[NewOrder]

[The Geek]

do a phrase search for GAB_
edit one and click save.

You really should do this for each phrase group. Saying that - your admincp shouldnt really be affected by that. You sure you ran the install?

[NewOrder]

yeh i ran the installer then had to edt global.php twice and the admincp/index.php as the installer couldnt

[Spinball]

Geek, mate, I have my own banner system running at www.avforums.com which is working fine and caters for about 20 million impressions per month.
A few features we have are
* campaign management where it's possible to set up one advert which runs across several 'zones'
* automatic creation of the zones from forum information
* geographic targetting (serve banners only to people from specific countries)
* distributed ad serving which serves banners (in specific zones) to the people who have seen them least.
* serves Google Adsense in locations where adverts are not sold.
* daily impressions and click reports

What I don't have is a vBulletin back end because I don't have time to learn vBulletin coding particularly deeply and I am happy to administer the system usnig phpMyAdmin.
Let me know if you would like to collaborate.