http://rot13.florianbersier.com/

We give away / review a lot of stuff on ModMyi.com in our iPhone forums. We have been experimenting with various methods of incorporating these giveaways into our site and social presence. As a site owner, you want to encourage a few things when giving something away:

• Brand loyalty. Whoa, cool, ModMyi always has free stuff, I love ModMyi! They must be huge too, because it’s always awesome stuff!
• Traffic. We do not have any premium services on the site; everything is free. We get paid based on advertising, and in order to do that we obviously need traffic on the site.
• Social networking. No need to go over the importance of a social network presence – we want one.
• Discussion. Discussion creates a bond with your site and the reader. Once they’ve registered and contributed to the community, they feel much closer to it. This is good!

We went through a bunch of ways of doing this… should we require just a comment on the story, and pick a winner for a giveaway? Should we require them to tweet something? Like a page? We tried tons of methods, and found if you ask the user to do more than two things, involvement drops quite a bit. As in, exponentially. And that’s why I love Rafflecopter.

Rafflecopter puts a widget in your giveaway which is a one-stop-shop place for you to have your users do all these things. I require them to leave a comment on the story (the only thing you can’t do FROM THE WIDGET), and then grant them “points” on other things they do: Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, Like the giveaway itself, and tweet a link to the giveaway. Rafflecopter allows you to do ALL these things FROM the widget – the user doesn’t have to go anywhere, and it takes them 30 seconds to do all 4 of those things. And in addition, the points model encourages participation (everyone loves earning points) – and is EXTREMELY easy for myself as an admin to manage on the backend. I can also choose and announce winners directly from the admin area. No more tallying points by hand etc. Great stuff.

My only issue currently is vBulletin itself doesn’t allow javascript to run in a post (which we don’t want it to – it’d be a security nightmare), so I’m having to IFRAME in a php page which has the js on it. Why is this an issue? Because Rafflecopter’s current options don’t allow for liking a SPECIFIC URL – only the one you’re on. So I have to ask the users to manually press the like button outside the widget on the site. I assume this feature can be easily added later, and hope they do – that’d make it perfect for what we’re trying to do.

Our first giveaway using Rafflecopter has already received over 2500 entries in a single day – with another day left. We gained 300 Facebook followers and quite a few on Twitter as well. Over 150 people both liked AND tweeted the URL to the giveaway. We’ll be using Rafflecopter for all our giveaways from now on – and they’re completely free. They plan to roll out some freemium features after establishing a user base.

Here’s another good code snippet. vBulletin allows for post titles, but users very rarely actually use this. Thing is, vBulletin displays the post title area even if there’s not one set. You wind up with what looks like either a signature out of place or a missing bit of text. I decided to remove this, but wasn’t able to find anywhere online where folks had mentioned how to. It’s fairly easy

In the postbit_legacy template, find the following code:

<vb:if condition="$post['title'] OR $show['messageicon']">
    <h2 class="title icon">
    <vb:if condition="$show['messageicon']"><img src="{vb:raw post.iconpath}" alt="{vb:raw post.icontitle}" /></vb:if>{vb:raw post.title}</h2>
  </vb:if>

and replace it with:

<vb:if condition="$post['title']==''"><vb:else />
  <vb:if condition="$post['title'] OR $show['messageicon']">
    <h2 class="title icon">
    <vb:if condition="$show['messageicon']"><img src="{vb:raw post.iconpath}" alt="{vb:raw post.icontitle}" /></vb:if>{vb:raw post.title}</h2>
  </vb:if>
</vb:if>

That’s it! All we’re doing is adding an additional if around the existing one, saying “if the post title == ” (nothing), don’t display the post title area.”

The ModMy sites run on vBulletin, and we use vBSEO for our SEO tool. Beginning in vBulletin 4.+, vBulletin has had a built in CMS called vBCMS for posting articles. Before that most people used vBAdvanced or WordPress for vBulletin 3.x installs.

After moving to vBCMS for our articles, we discovered we could no longer get social sharing buttons (like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Digg, etc) to work on the front page. Because we use vBSEO (which rewrites URLs server-side through PHP) and the button codes are all in JavaScript (which is client-side), attempting to use vBulletin’s standard {vb:raw page_url} was returning the standard vBulletin URL, not the correct vBSEO’d URL. I asked for help at vBSEO.com multiple times, but they simply told me they don’t support vBCMS (great – that’s ALL our articles). I finally found a solution which I thought I’d share here as I’m sure others are looking for it. So here’s what I did to fix this.

I created a plugin and called it vbseod url.

The product was vBulletin, hook location is vbcms_article_populate_end. Execution order I set at 5. The following was the plugin code that eventually worked:

$replace_forvbseo = array('http://modmyi.com','http://www.modmyi.com','content.php?r=','.');
$replace_withvbseo= array('','','','-');

$replace_forvbseo2 = array('-as-','-of-','-in-','-is-','-it-','-an-','-and-','-with-','-for-','-to-','-this-','-from-','-by-','-a-','-on-','-the-','-at-','-be-','-or-','(',')','*','–');
$replace_withvbseo2 = array('-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','-','','','','');

$view->page_url_vbseo = str_replace($replace_forvbseo2,$replace_withvbseo2,strtolower($vbulletin->options['bburl'] . '/content' . (str_replace($replace_forvbseo,$replace_withvbseo,($view->page_url))) . '.html'));

This creates a variable you can use in vBCMS called page_url_vbseo. You can of course set that to whatever you’d like, that’s just what I used. You’ll also need to change where I have http://modmyi.com and http://www.modmyi.com to your domain.

For some reason simply using the $replace_withvbseo wasn’t working for CMS articles, so I had to add in some manual stuff. I think I have the majority of them replaced (see $replace_forvbseo2 where I have listed the words I’ve found which still needed to be removed). If you need to add to those, you’ll have to add them in that line.

Then I had a nice variable working which I could put in my templates anywhere by adding {vb:raw page_url_vbseo}.

For instance, in my site, I decided to put Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus on the homepage as options, so used this code:

<div id="share" style="margin: 3px 0 3px 0;"><a class="twitter-share-button" href="http://twitter.com/share" data-text="Nice article -" data-url="{vb:raw page_url_vbseo}" data-count="horizontal" data-via="modmyi">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
      (function() {     var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true;     po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';     var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);   })();
// ]]></script>
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
    (function(d){   var js, id = 'facebook-jssdk'; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;}   js = d.createElement('script'); js.id = id; js.async = true;   js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=246181135426205&xfbml=1";   d.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(js); }(document));
// ]]></script></div>

That may change as each platform adjusts their button codes, but it’s just the individual button codes (Google any buttons you’d like to get their code). Notice in there where I have put the {vb:raw page_url_vbseo} code. The correct vBulletin template to make these changes in is vbcms_content_article_preview. To have the buttons appear under the main title of each article like we do on ModMyi.com, insert the share code I just pasted under the following code in the  vbcms_content_article_preview template:

<vb:if condition="$showtitle">
	<div class="title">
		<h3 class="article_preview">
			<a style="color: black;" href="{vb:raw page_url}"><span>{vb:raw title}</span></a> 
		<vb:if condition="$can_edit">
			<a class="edit" href="{vb:raw edit_url}">
			<img class="editimage" src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_cms}/edit_small.png" alt="{vb:rawphrase edit}" />
			</a>
		</vb:if>
		</h3>
	</div>
	</vb:if>

Make sure when you get your button code you tell it NOT to use the URL it’s on, but a custom URL. Then replace it with the above bold code, and that’s how I got the correct code from the large block above.

There you have it!