I got this working straight off, thanks!

I have 2 questions

Q1: I have a question concerning timing several feeds: how would i stagger the postings so they aren't consecutive - I don't want to annoy members with too frequent (consecutive) posting?

For example, if I set up the individual feeds for periods of 1hr 1.5 hr, 2hr, 2.5 hr, for example, will I need to cron it every 1/2 hour or so to avoid getting several at one time?

Q2 second question is about moving threads. If I move a post made by the robot to a different forum, or delete it, or even PURGE (remove completely) will it know that it has already postedthat news item, or will it try to post it again?

Regards,

Matt

I am using CPanel and have the Cron jobs available.
I click it and select Standard Mode.

And below that, Entry 1 and Command to run:
What is the command I need to type in??

I get "Google Alerts" occasionally.

Could I use Google Alerts as RSS?

I would think it would be

Absolutely.

But you need to have something receive the text email version of the alert and convert it to RSS for you.

There are free email2rss gateways out there, or you can work on your own ;)

This is precisely what I have in place use articlebot for... I have signed up to many music email news lists on sites that don't have RSS feeds. But I receive the emails, publish them as an RSS feed, and then consume them with the articlebot and thus they appear in as threads on my forum.

If you need a hand with the choices available for email2rss gateways, just ask.

Any ideas how I can make it post more of the description instead of just 1 line

example here http://www.cardschat.com/t4-%5Bblog-...ies-world.html

That is what the RSS feed is giving, and is not related to the article bot, the best option would be to try and find an RSS feed giving more!

Great hack.

One problem I'm having is one of the BEST sites in my subject matter uses a weird RSS tag. Instead of having an description he uses <content:encoded> to list his news content. Is there anyway somebody could point me to what I have to modify? I'm decent at PHP, I just don't know where to start.

This would have to be a custom modification. Like asking IF this is that FEED use the content node instead of the description node.

Here is the feed:
http://halo.bungie.org/rss2channel.xml

took me a bit to figure out the whole cron thing, but got it going! thx for the work!

/me clicks install

How did you get the cron setup??

I dont know but mine doesn't work as of yet. ive set it all up and added a bot with feeds. it just the time registered is all weird. I mean i set it up today for every two hours but it says next time that it will feed is at 2 tomorow? which is in a long time. Anyone got any clue?

/usr/local/bin/php /home/path/public_html/forum/articlebot/articlebot.php

in the cmd box.. then set a time. also good for testing have it go to an email you can check. pretty much if it doesnt send you an email when it runs, then it works lol

your path will vary depending on your server.

/usr/local/bin/php this was my path to my php excutable, pretty common, but double check.

hello, I just installed and tested it quickly by inserting the include _once in index.php at the bottom as instructed. Then although it got the news, it also showed on top of the browser the following:

Warning: Cannot use a scalar value as an array in /mnt/hda3/www/site/forums/articlebot/articlebot.php on line 325

I did a search here and could not find the meaning of this. Any help is greatly appreciated, and thanks for the script.

can someone please help me find the Path to my php executable. I think it is

/usr/local/lib/ but when i use this as the value on the cron job it does not work as i get the email /usr/local/lib/ is a directory. When replace path/to/forums/articlebot/articlebot.php do we use the full path? someone please help!

If you don't know how to use a cron job, why not just assign scheduled tasks in the adminCP to do it for you? Much better that way.

But if you insist on a cron job. I'm using Cpanel and this is what I would probably put in my cron slot; /home/username/public_html/forums/articlebot/articlebot.php

Replace username with your account username, and replace forums/articlebot/articlebot.php with whatever the correct path is.

Why does it ask us to use /usr/local/bin/php ? :speechless: infront of the actual path?

those are the php binaries. It is what allows the program to be excuted.

Yould also use the wget command

I have this weird permission issue...the article bots post are always published...I've made a new usergroup for the bot, with limited permissions and 'always moderate posts', but the articlebot just ignores those settings and keeps on posting...any other ideas on moderating it's posts???

Or you could add some minor hacks and use the VB cron system.

I did this as I'm using mmcache and calling the PHP binaries directly seemed to cause errors. By hacking the code to be a cron job I can call it from VB and have everything work without error... as well as have a log of what it going on (more hacking!).

But it all works fine, and the syntax is not hard to figure out... take a peek at the other cron jobs ;)

Does anyone know how to setup the Google News Alert? http://www.google.com/alerts?q=&hl=en

Yes, the robot has carte blanche. It can even post to forums that don't allow posting. Probably the pulldown list for forumids should skip them, but it doesn't. You'd probably need to hack the code and set whatever flag is associated with each post for moderation status.

Regards,

Matt

I think you are asking not how to setup the Google News Alert but how to configure the Article Bot to post from a Google News Alert?

I don't think that's possible, yet.

But on a related point I am upset that about 1/2 the articles the Google News Alert turns up seem to require a password subscription. Sometimes not on the first visit from the mail link, but as the post ages a day or two, or perhaps on return visits.

Have you seen this? http://www.bugmenot.com (a system that provides free passwords for various news and subscription services)

Regards,

Matt

Great hack!

Installed and working a treat, thanks :)

Is that true? :(
I receive the google e-mails about the topic that I like and wanted to setup with the Article Bot hack.

I thought some other member in this thread (few pages earlier) mention that it does work. I should look back and post.

Here it is!
buro9, please help me on setting up Google News Alert to work together with the Article Bot. Thank you.

You want to be looking at this:
http://wonko.com/software/mailfeed/

It's what I use with Article Bot to get emails into forums via RSS.

If you don't want to go so far as hacking scripts, then consider mail bucket:
http://www.mailbucket.org/

In both cases you'll need to modify Article Bot slightly to allow any sized RSS description to pass throught (so the email content isn't truncated).

I can't get this to work, tried it with yahoo and bbc feeds, doesn't seem to get anything, I run the script and the page is blank with the text "ArticleBOT"

When i try to Add Article Bot I get this Error message?
What does it mean?

Do i have to create a member on the forum first with this "Bot name"?

ErikXXon
Ill have VB 3.0.3

The PHP script just updates the database entries, it is not supposed to display anything itself. It's like a "cron job" and not meant to generate any visible output.

I'm using this as a way to incorporate Web links via My Furl from the RSS feed, see example. It could be cool, because then we could also have discussions about the web links if we want.

Is there any way to stop posts from Articlebot from showing up in New Posts? I had another feed set up, but I ended up deleting it because I didn't like all of the items from that feed showing up under New Posts.

Does vBulletin have a mechanism, or is there a hack available, to exclude forum(s) from the New Posts? I'm using separate forums for each feed, so if there was some way I could exclude a forum from the New Posts, that would work.

I had the same problem at first. You need to use the numerical user ID e.g. "12" not the user name when you set it up in Add Article Bot. After you have that set up with the number, it should display the user name

There are probably a dozen different ways to do it, but to find the number, I went to Admin CP -> Users -> Search for Users -> Show All Users and then just let the pointer "hover" over the User link in the left hand column, the last part of the link will say something like "userid=12" where "12" is the numerical user ID in this case.

The question for the user is: Do you want feeds to show up as posts belonging to some user? For the set up with My Furl, it kind of makes sense to have web links that I added show up as from my user, but for many kinds of feeds, it is probably better to set up some bogus user like "Articlebot" and have the posts show up as belonging to that user.

You probably also want to create a New Forum where the articles will go rather than having them posted to another, already existing forum. When you create the forum, you may want to think about whether to "Count Posts Made in this Forum Towards User Post Counts." I decided to leave that "Yes" since people might post replies to some of the articles that show up. However, some people can get ridiculously competetive about post counts :rolleyes: and might complain that it is "unfair" so keep that in mind ;)

Why don't you just try typing in the path to the PHP script on the command line and see what happens :rolleyes: cron usually uses "sh" or "bash" to process commands in crontab, and those command shells may have no idea what to do with a PHP script, so you may actually have to invoke the PHP executable to process the PHP script :eek:

As someone else said, you could use "wget" (if it's installed on your web server) and point it to the URL instead if you prefer, and that should work just as well. The script has got to be parsed by PHP one way or another, it is not an executable binary, it is just a bunch of PHP commands. The only difference is what way you use to get PHP to process the script.

Try this:

tcsh -c "which php"

or

csh -c "which php"

Is it possible to exclude some user from showing up in New Posts? If I could do that, then I could just exclude the Articlebot user from new posts, and that would work too.

I found this mod to the navbar template that's supposed to let you exclude forum(s) from New Posts, going to give it a try...
exclude forum(s) from New Posts

Just installed. Works great! :)

Does anyone have a way to exclude article bots from being considered for the "top poster" stats?


also:

If you just installed it, I think you need to wait until there are new articles on your RSS feeds that are after the time you first ran it.

I checked the feeds I was going to use with a desktop RSS reader. My articlebots would not import information from the feeds the first time I ran it, but once new articles were added to the feeds after I ran my Articlebots the first time, the articles would then show up.

(someone please correct me if I am wrong, but that seemed to be the case with my install. If this is the case, it would be a good piece of info to include in the install notes...)

Hi, it is quite cool .... one thing i dont understand is why it does not work with the cron system of VB ? is there a way to do that ?

Do you mean a cron job to get new articles from the feed?

I have encountered an interesting post display order issue...

I have one of my articlebots retrieve 5 articles at a time, when it does that, the posts displayed @ forumdisplay are ordered like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101
http://www.mydomain.com/forums/showthread.php?t=102
http://www.mydomain.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103
http://www.mydomain.com/forums/showthread.php?t=104
http://www.mydomain.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105

The problem with that is that the 5th post down is really the most recent post. This is a little confusing because @ the index.php, the thread "t=105" is shown as the "Last Post", but once the user enters the forum (forumdisplay.php), the thread "t=101" appears to be the most recent/last posted thread.

Any ideas on how to get bot to enter the posts in the correct order?