That's correct about the postintervals. And the doubleposting--I am having the same problem, and it's pissing me off to no end. I'm trying to pin down why it's happening, and if I do, I'll let you know.

In my case, it's because there is more than one instance of the article in the RSS :) The bot should be able to check if the title would be a duplicate; if so, don't post.

That's what it does, in theory. Here's the relevant code, I think:

By any chance, are the articles that are being duplicated in your installation only those that have a long title (at least longer than the others?) I'm trying to see what the duplicated threads have in common. On mine, it seems to be only the articles with the longest titles.

Check this out: In my forum, the longest threads have names like this:

Immunohistochemical Stains for p63 and alpha-Methylacyl-CoA Racemase, Versus a Cocktail Comprising Both, in the Diagnosis of Prostatic Carcinoma: A Comparison of the Immunohistochemical Staining of 430 Foci in Radical Prostatectomy and Needle Biopsy

However, the feed itself gives the title as this (ignore the html characters):

Immunohistochemical%20Stains%20for%20p63%20and%20
alpha-Methylacyl-CoA%20Racemase%2C%20Versus%20a%20
Cocktail%20Comprising%20Both%2C%20in%20the%20Diagn osis%20
of%20Prostatic%20Carcinoma%3A%20A%20Comparison%20o f%20
the%20Immunohistochemical%20Staining%20of%20430%20 Foci
%20in%20Radical%20Prostatectomy%20and%20Needle%20
Biopsy%20Tissues.

These are not identical. If you look, the last part of the feed's title has a few extra words. For some reason, the title is getting truncated as it is being written into the forum, which is why the script, which I believe uses the title and postdate to determine identical-ness, fails to see these as identical.

Now to find the responsible code and drop a major load of hurt on this stupid bug.

Update: The problem is that the title row in the post table (of vbulletin) is of type varchar(250), and some of the full titles are >250 characters. To include the full titles, I may need to change the column type to TEXT. I wonder if this will wreck my vbulletin due to unforeseen badness...I will ask around before I try it and will update the thread.

Update: Fixed the doubleposting of articles with long titles issue. Go into PHPmyadmin and change the column type of the "title" row of the articlebot_rss_cache table from Varchar(255) to "text". That eliminates the 255 character limit for titles in the feed cache and stops the doubleposting. Note that the thread title ON THE POST will still be limited to 254 characters, but this shouldn't be a problem at all for most people.

I'm using running the article bot in a cron tab. I receive this error when it runs:

/bin/sh: line 1: /usr/local/lib/php: is a directory

The instructions state the php dir, well that is the php dir (i checked with my host). Any ideas what's wrong?

that is the php directory, but you need to run the php executable binary file. On many servers, it's at the address /usr/local/bin/php

Give that a shot.

There would appear to be a limit of 250-255 characters or so in the forum titles. Maybe it's a limit set in the hack but probably it's a database limitation, too.

Regards,

Matt

Yeah, it's a databse limitation. From my above post :)

Thanks for the help though.
Kenny

I am not sure my article bot is 100% up-to-date - I installed 10/15/04 and article bot has a comment in it dated articlebot.php, v1.1, 07/25/04

However each time the bot makes a post I get emailed the following error. I am 98% sure it is coming from my friend the 'bot.

Q1: Does anyone else get these ( I mean obviously it is trying to add an array to a scalar - but why?)
Q2: Any idea what could be the actual cause?

Are you running PHP5?