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?