UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 6 V6 Modifications Forum Design Integration Anyone have a hack for forum sponsors?

Anyone have a hack for forum sponsors like sitepoint has: http://www.sitepointforums.com
I like the idea of having category forum sponsors.

Strange.. I was just at sitepoint today and noticed that myself and was thinking about the idea

I find that to be a MUCH more acceptable means of advertising, that isn't intrusive to the visitors, yet the businesses that are advertising get to have high visibility throughout the site, not just a banner at the top or having ads being blocked by blocking software.

This hack could be either very simple, or very complex. Very simple as far as just making the code insert an image in each category, or very complex with randomization and clickthrough tracking

Yep, I was thinking very simple, just sell out the categories and when their all used up, well supply and demand.
Plus, forums have a very low click through rate and ad banners are hard to sell.

Well this is accomplished the same way as a banner ad. If you look at sitepoint you will see by looking at the template what to do.

try doing it like I did on my site and putting it in the forum description under the title. I just put a "powered by soandso.com" in it. It's not intrusive, but can be seen. look here, and it's easy to change, obviously

Hmm.. also an idea

That is a neat idea that I haven't thought of, I was thinking I would put a small pic and text in the small table right above each category kind of like sitepoint would be cool. Just have to figure out how much to charge.

1 bazillion dollars!

[]Jeremy said:
1 bazillion dollars! [/]
Cool, that would pay for one month of hosting.

You could use this which is how I add various text tidbits here to the top of each forum. Instructions, links etc.... but you could include images, banners, etc..

It's not a pretty hack. I only wrote it up because people asked how I did it here. But it works. Allows you to personalize the top of each forum's postlist page.

Are you talking about the top of the categories like sitepoint or the top of an indv forum?

No this is info at the top of the postlist page. Go in and out of most of the forums here and you'll see some additional text/links or instructions at the top of the postlist page - specific to each forum.

For example - I have some useful links at the top of the CSS forum.... and some more useful links at the top of the MySQL forum. etc....

I'd use phpAdsNew to manage the banners.
You can define a categorie in phpAdsNew for each board. Apply the correct banner to the category and simply reference with remote invocation.
Make sure that you also use the categorie name of threads as the category keyword in phpAdsNew.

If there aren't any buttons/banners in the category, a default banner or simply nothing can be displayed.

Of course, phpAdsNew tracks all the views, hits etc. of the buttons which might be interesting for your customers also.

Very nice josh.

phpAdsNew is about the hardest piece of software to configure though.

I disagree Chuck. For me it was really easy to put it into action. All you have to do is create a publisher which effectively is yourself (reeftalk). Then you specify zones for this publisher which are locations on your website. The top banner zone, a zone in the sidebar another at the bottom of your site. In those zones you specify the dimentions of your banners. Usually you use 468x60 for the top banners.

Then what you do is you create your advertisers each with their own login information so that they can access their stats. You bind each banner to the respective advertiser and then each banner to a zone making sure that the banner has the same dimentions as the target zone. PhpAdsNew does the rest. You can tweak the advertisers and what they are allowed to do for each banner making the delivery specific to some days, hours etc. And also if you have a high paying advertisers you can adjust the weight of the delivery to make their banner stand out more.

It is really a nice piece of software. Perhaps if the documentation was a bit clearer regarding the zones and the banners ....

The documentation has been improved very much, aswell as the help system.
Yes, it's a bit hard to get used to the way campaigns are handled, but the system is very advanced and powerfull. It's much better than most of the commercial advertising applications.

And i love the look of the GUI.

Yeah I have alwys had problems getting it to display right in respect to zones etc. Like for instance say top banner and have 5 or so rotating banners. The documentation whenever I have tried in the past was a bit lacking.

I may have to give it another try and see what I can come up with.

Yeah, that's a lot easier now.
Create one or several campaigns, create the banners in the campaign and assign all the banners to one zone. You only have to make sure, that the banner sizes are compatible.
Then just generate the invocation code for your zone and include it in your template.
With adjusting the "weight" of a campaign or banner you can control how often a specific banner should be displayed.

Thanx guys I took a look at the new phpAdsNew and I must say it is alot easier than last time I tried.

Nikos thanks for the exact directions got it up and running no problem this time.

No problem Chuck. It took me a bit to get the hang of it but once I got it it is a 2 minute job to ad a new campaign/advertiser.

Yeah the new version is alot easier than previous versions.

I downloaded and installed phpAdsNew, and man, after looking through all the settings and manuals, I have a headache. I guess I'll have to find some time where I can read through everything. But, I guess since the manuals are long as heck, and all the settings are extensive, it must be a powerful solution.

If you follow exactly what Nikos posted above you will have it set up in no time.

One question...how do I actually get the banners and whatnot into my threads site??

By placing the invocation code that is made into where you want it in Threads.

You have various methods of deployment. The best one is to use local storage (the banner resides in a folder on your server instead of the database). Use the invocation code which will put the banners linked on the appropriate zone. The invocation code will look something like this:

<script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript'>

<!--

if (!document.phpAds_used) document.phpAds_used = ',';
document.write ("<" + "script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript' src='");
document.write ("http://www.drumlines.org/pads/adjs.php?n=ab9dd172");
document.write ("&what=zone:4&target=_blank");
document.write ("&exclude=" + document.phpAds_used);

if (document.referer)
document.write ("&referer=" + escape(document.referer));
document.write ("'><" + "/script>");

//-->

</script><noscript><a href='http://www.drumlines.org/pads/adclick.php?n=ab9dd172' target='_blank'><img src='http://www.drumlines.org/pads/adview.php?what=zone:4&n=ab9dd172' border='0' alt=''></a></noscript>

The above is the Javascript method.

Thanks all! I will look more into the program.