Look at the front page of my site.

Boom.

The site is still being constructed (aren't they all . . .) but the articlebot is working. I am using a custom template for the articlebot forum, that's why you don't see all the reply buttons, post numbers, etc.

Is there a reason why the vBullein scheduled tasks aren't working for this? I used ./articlebot/articlebot.php and tried to run it, but there were no results.

If possible, it's best to run this using a regular server cron job (eg. /usr/local/bin/php /home/whatever/vbulletin/articlebot/articlebot.php). That's how I have mine set up and it works great. Also, if you do it this way, there are not the interspersed pauses whenever an unlucky user loads a page when it's time for a feed update.

I'll look into that. It did start working, however.
I see there are like 15 scheduled tasts by other hacks. They haven't caused any load problems like you mention...?

Hmm..actually I think you're right about not having the interspersed updates when you use the vbulletin cron. I know you DO get them if you have an include for articlebot.php on your forum home, for example, though.

One other drawback of having them in your vbulletin cron is that if your forum isn't very busy, it won't get updated often. Someone has to use your vbulletin for your vbulletin cron to work. I guess the upside is that it's easy to set up. . .

I noticed one of my feeds wasn't working and when I sent it through Feed Validator I got this error ...

Is this something Article Bot can account for?

Thanks,
Layne

Can someone please explain the difference between the cron and the post interval? Right now I created a custom RSS for certain Google News terms and its results are both ever-changing and unpredictable. I've set the cron for every hour and the interval for every 5 minutes or so. Also, I set the amount to process at each time for 1, the default and recommendation. Does this mean that if there's duplicates, they won't be posted and only 1 can be posted every 5 minutes?

The cron and postinterval thing is kind of confusing. I have my articlebot.php set to run (via a server cron job) every five minutes. However, I have my post intervals set to anywhere between 120 minutes to 3600 minutes. So what happens is that the articlebot.php runs every 5 minutes, but I have my rss feeds "staggered". If the postinterval has elapsed for any of my given feeds THAT FEED gets updated while the others do not. Each time articlebot.php is run, maybe only 1-2 of my feeds' postinterval is up.

The amount to process I set to like 20 or something. For example, if your feed has 3 NEW posts and yours is set to 20, it will download only those 3 new posts. But if your amount is set to 1 and your feed gets 3 new ones, it will only grab one of them (each time it runs.)

Confusing.
Kenny

Are you talking about the feeds that articlebot enters into the forums (i.e. external feeds)? Or are you talking about a feed of YOUR page. If you're talking about an external feed, articlebot doesn't have anything to do with the content of the file it processes. I don't know whether it converts the "non-valid" (but still useable) feeds into valid XML.

So, the postintervals tell the cron whether to process the threads at that time, correct?

Earlier today, my bot posted the same article 3 times. How can this be prevented?