im still looking to see what i can find. so far i have no clue and the only thing i can say is that it and another mod you have are interferring.

actually it only runs one time. some people posting problems with duplicates actually have different news feeds. the script looks for the field pubDate ... some have something different for the date field like cc:date, some don't have a date field at all. also, one bug that i am pretty sure is in there that i will try and fix for the next update deals with duplicates.

if there is a " in the title, it will still post that even if it was posted before. this is because when it checks the database this is what happens:

title: this is my "news" feed
database: this is my \"news\" feed

both technically are the same, except for the escaped quotes. i think this is cause some posts with quotes in the title to be duplicated. i'm going to look into it further. i'm also trying to update the way posts are deleted with the delete all news function.

Beleive me it does run more than once from cron. I added some code to log when it runs and it shows it ran 4 times back to back on the scheduled time. I get 4 entries everytime it runs. For some reason it runs until the next scheduled task runs and doesn't stop after the first run.

I agree, I think this is my problem too, however why is it running 4 times, why are the other crons ok?

Slapyo - thanks very much for your continued work on this hack. You are saving us all a great deal of time.

that's odd because mine is only running 1 time. if you come up with a fix for it let me know and i will include it in the package.

could you send me the code you used to log it so i can use it in mine and see if it helps with debugging. don_lacuran@hotmail.com is my email.

there is no loop in the program to grab the rss file more than once. unless of course you have more than one rss bot. i don't have this problem on mine, but it seems to be an issue with others. hopefully we can get it worked out.

Article titles like the following are not recognized as duplicates.

**** Clark Has Diabetes, Says PR Firm (AP)
$1.2M for WTC Workers (AP)

In the database the $ sign is converted to &#36 ;
I don't understand why the first one is not recognized as a duplicate.

I'd like to know this too as I only want a few news posts per day.
Joe


Would changing this:
for($j = count($rss_allItems) - 1; $j >= 0; $j--) {

to this work:
for($j = 10 - 1; $j >= 0; $j--) {

???????

Joe

ya, that looks like the code you would edit. then you only make your script run once every 24 hours in the cron job. and for the code you posted, you would get 10 news articles a day.

Great, thanks for the quick reply

hello ive just done the code edit above to try and limit the number of posts the rss bot posts but it doesnt seem to be working,i only need 10 news items posted but its posting over 100 :surprised:
any idea why the above wouldnt work?
ive set my cron to 24hr update

in rss_update.php FIND:
REPLACE WITH:
you are replacing "count($rss_allItems)" with the number of news articles you want. in the example code above i replaced it with 10. so it will take the 10 news articles and post them. however, i don't know if this will be a problem or not because if there are only like 5 news articles and you have hard coded in 10 news articles it might pose a problem.

thanks

ive set it so i can moderate the posts from the yahoo feed so i can pick 10 feeds and prune the rest.

WICKED hack!
thanks

newest version: 1.24 (PHP > 4.3.0) and 1.24a (PHP < 4.3.0)

i rewrote the way Delete All News was done. it now uses a function within vB to delete the posts rather than a manual deletion of them. helps keep everything neat. it will also recount the posts in the forum.

Is there a way not to add the news posts to the total posts number?

the original one did not increase the post count. but search and similiar threads didn't work either. i don't offer support for either of those. there has been numerous fixes and upgrades to the way things work. i would suggest that you use the modified original version if you are going to use one of them. it is more stable than the original.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=60899 - original
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=139 - modified original

what would I be doing wrong? The task is not updating on its own. It works fine when I hit the "run now" button. I have it set to run every hour.

do you have a busy forum? i found the way that the cron jobs work in vB is that say you have a list of cron jobs 10 long. the page has to be loaded at or after the scheduled time for the cron job. my forum isn't too busy now and i found to get it to run i have to just reload the page a few times and the news will be inserted. mine is set to run at the hour every hour. if it hasn't run, i look in the scheduled tasks to see how many jobs before it haven't run yet. then i refresh the forums that many times.

Actually no this is a test forum that I setup.

then that might be the problem. it's not actually a true cron job which will run on the hour every hour. you have to have the pages being loaded to check for the next cron job time. if it is time, or past time, it will run...next page load checks for the next cron job.

first: great hack :up:
second: I tried to run the cronjob and got this error message...

thx for help

maresi

I'm thrilled to have found this hack! I grabbed the latest live linked version as of yesterday (I'm running PHP 4.3.5), and followed the installation instructions. I did create a bot user, and a special forum for it to play in. I can get to the RSS administration panel, added a bot... but then nothing.

Question: When you run the ./rss.php task from the Scheduled Task manager, is there any confirmation message at all? Whenever I click it, it just says Update RSS... and nothing else. No error, but no "Done" either. It doesn't show up in the scheduled task log, either, which makes me doubt it's running.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

sounds like you have a problem with open_basedir. are the files in the right folders? might want to check your php.ini file or do a phpinfo() and see if open_basedir has any restrictions in place.

nothing is posted to the log, even if it is turned on ... i plan on adding this feature in. if you see update rss then it ran without any major errors heh, thats the best i can tell you. i haven't even touched that part of the script yet.

what is the rss news feed you are trying to use, can u post the link to it.

Thanks for the quick reply! Here's my intended feed:

http://www.topix.net/rss/state/hi/

Ryan

Can anyone put together a list of the RSS feeds that DO work with this? Slashdot, for example, doesn't.

that is an RDF feed. won't work, only RSS feeds.

my inital post has a list of them. if any don't work let me know so i can remove.

Common RSS Feeds:
- Yahoo!
- CNET.com
- BBC
- Wired News
- The Register
- Ars Technica

When I add a new bot, do I just say "Yahoo!" for source, do i put in yahoo.com/rss ??? or what

That would explain it! Fortunately, I found the feeds put out by AllHeadlineNews.com do work, and with regional news feeds, that's all I need. Now to read up on how to tweak the bot's posts... here.

For those interested (and if you'll pardon the self-link), here's my newsbot's playground. I too tweaked the post format (rather than "View the entire article," I just made the headline a link). I sure wish my RSS source would pass a little more meat in the item description, though!

Finally, this autoprune hack makes a great partner with the RSS News Feed hack. If your bot is posting dozens of threads a day, this can make sure you don't suddenly find yourself with 5,000 threads in your bot's forum.

for the source you will put in the URL to the RSS news feed.

First of all, nice work. I read through the original hack thread and this one and came up with a question.

I'm runnig a german board and tried some rss feeds. most of them don't have a pubDate field. What happens when they don't have this field? Does it work anyway or do I have to create a workaround for it?

Any other german here with good working news feeds?

Now this is tru be lucky to get 3 words :(

it should work, it just won't submit anything to the rss_date field in the database. then this means that when it is checking for duplicates it won't find any "old" articles and it will post duplicates if there are any.

ya .... that's the problem of most RSS news feeds, but the purpose of them is not to give the full article, but just to give a tiny description of what the article is about. they want you to goto their site to read the whole article. although some places put the whole news in the RSS feed. just gotta find those places or deal with the tiny TINY descriptions. i wish they would give a little bit longer description, not just a sentance, maybe more like a paragraph.

ok , i have installed it and i still have no feeds ?

My request with this would be a mod to have each NewsFeed in one thread, not a new thread for each feed ...

Any ideas Slapyo ?

do you get any kind of error messages at all? is everything correct?

you set up a bot?
you set up scheduled task?
you installed everything properly?

what is the link to the rss feed you are using.

could be done ... would have to look into it. would probably just be a shift in the code and change a couple things. the title would be something like "news posted at {insert time}" then inside would have the news description and link for every news article. lemme look into it some.

yup yup

un-install it went back to the first one .... but that one only on forum feeds out of 4

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