Sorry, that I didn't have time to answer all your questions.

I was (and still am) very busy with music production and releasing the site.

Anyway, the question if it is possible to show an online state has been already cleared at the beginning of the thread:

NO!!! :(

Therefor Microsoft would have to release a code how to ask for the status at the MSN server, and that will never happen! :(


To vBPortal:

I don't know this software because we have written our own CMS. :D :D
But normally it should be possible to integrate it.
Surely you can create additional boxes in vbportal and there you can add the code from the templates.
That should work.
I know that it works with phpwebsite!

this is a kewl hack

[QUOTE][i]Surely you can create additional boxes in vbportal and there you can add the code from the templates.
That should work.
I know that it works with phpwebsite! [/B]

great hack m8

I'm still looking for something more simple than this. All I want is for someone to be able to have the user input their MSN contact address in the UserCP profile and have an icon show in postbit. When it's clicked, I want a small popup to appear with the info on it. Also, when someone views a profile, I want it to appear with the other IM info, not with the custom profiles.

I know it's not too tough, but it's beyond me. I'm not very experienced when it comes to this. Can this be done?

Hi

I installed it in my vBulletin 2.2.0 and everything was done fine
but when I enter my hotmail account and hit go i get the following error :

Line 336
Error : illegal assignment : 'i'

What could be the problem here ?

Please help me ! See the above error I get !
Most of my members use MSN so this would be a great addition to my site !

Thanks.

I don't like the unnecessary line break right above where it says "Online Contacts." How can I delete this? Screen shot below:

VBPORTAL: For those of you just wanting to put this into a side block, you don't need to follow any of the included directions. I am attaching what you need to put into your side and forum blocks. The only difference between what I am attaching, and what is in the template stuff included with this hack is just some table mods to accomodate the vbportals side blocks. Hope this helps; it seems to work for me fine.

BTW, thanks for the great hack!!

Thanks!!!! Great hack here.. Thanks also to cobradude, that was exactly what I was looking for too.

BTW, working great, no problems at all with this one.

the original rip was from the msn page about 3/4 of a year ago...
it was 2 parts a html frontend that calls a vbscript that connects to a OLE object made available by MSN messenger application.

Yes the script is bad and buggy, nothing is done to make it better we just repackaged it and made it working with vb and my own written portal.

In most cases only edit the template to accommodate the hack in other environments.
if you are up to cleaning up programming crap of our friend Bill then please edit the vbscript... lol...
maybe i will fetch a new script when they changed it.

Worked great for me - no problems (and that's saying a lot for me!)

I'm running 2.2.1 and all I did was follow the instructions. :)

Christian,

and everyone else...

I have tidied up and read through the vb part of the script (I don't put vb on my site until I know what it does) and I can tell you that:

1) The script is fine... few errors, but they're easily dealt with.
2) I have re-formatted, if you would like me to supply this to you christian I can.
3) Microsoft have implemented tracking of this app.

Number 3 being something a lot of you will have issues with.

There is an image named mctrack which is null to start with, but on every click is assigned a different value which is always a get request from the MS site.

Whilst doing a wget of the image returns a 302 and then a 404, I have no doubt that it's irrelevant... getting stats from an error log is as easy as from a web log, except you get the benefit of not having to actually serve anything so you have lower bandwidth as a result.

So there you have it, a nice tracking and stats thing built in... which, btw, is easily removed.

Again, Christian mail me and I shall give you an updated version.

I would suggest also making a second layout... so you have the default layout as currently is, and a second layout that actually resembles the vBulletin who's online bar on the forum homepage, i.e. horizontal. This was users could place it at the bottom of all forum display pages easily and avoid having to litter threads and post pages with it.

Just my thoughts and discoveries.

Cheers

David K

One more thing, anyone wanting more information to construct a cleaner interface can view the API's at http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/.../359/topic.xml

Thanks for the time you have put in this david... :)

I got quite far with my mine (screenshot attached), and it's a little more elegant in that it users the vBulletin template system rather than create another php file.

But... you can see that on the web it doesn't show you the user names... why? I believe this is because of a recent security change in MSN Messenger because of the virus a coupla weeks ago. Looks like the best thing we can do is re-rip the vb (now jscript) code from hotmail!

Ah well, all that effort to start over again!

Maybe I'll do it, but I'm feeling tired and exhausted so maybe not, though I'd let you all know in any case.

can someone Modify this Hack and make it show names of the online ppl, and when I login from the xtreme forumz it opens the hotmail login page and doesn't login MSN... can someone plz do that? or the owner?

There's little point Webmasta XT.

I tried to bring the hack forward somewhat to fit my own needs... and discovered in the process that Messenger 4.6 (the now default that all others will prompt upgrade to) doesn't show usernames.

This is something that Miscrosoft have hard coded into Messenger, only Microsoft domains are 'trusted' alongside 'localhost'... what this means is that you can get it working locally, and see it working on Hotmail... but you cannot use it elsewhere.

If you did not see the virus (ok, it was harmless... but M$ didn't like it) on Messenger recently... it seems that this put such a shock through the M$ system for this release to come out.

4.6 is nothing but a point release security patch addressing this issue.

Unless you can guarantee your users are on a previous version (you can't) there is no more point furthering this hack as it is. M$ simply don't want you to be able to do this, and they have very successfully stopped everyone from doing it.

Oh well, such a shame... I had such a lovely Javascript version working too.

Cheers

David K

I should have pointed out that the above link to the API's on the M$ site have now been updated to reflect the fact that the friendlynames array is now restricted.

DUDE!!!

that owns.... 10/10 XD

to bad about the names :(

Ok install went great and works great too . I have the news script on my board and I installed the additional hack to get it to work again but i dont know the value that I am suppose to enter for xxx....
Anyone able to help here?

I am glad other people took over the hack and keep maintaining it...
Thanks, i simply don't have the priorities set for that piece of code... sorry i have too little time and too much to explore...

Bas.

nice job guys ,, but i have one thing ,,

i can not see the names of my contacts ,, only icons are showing up.

what to do

read back at my posts, Microsoft changed messenger in reaction to a virus, as a result you cannot access the names array unless you are one of their trusted sites (i.e. microsoft.com, passport.com and hotmail.com).

bad luck i'm afraid.

david k

Yeah - I have this running on my site really well, but no names show up unfortunately. My members do like it anyway.