I have been using this hack for a long time now to display the latest news on my forum. So far the news bot has made some 136,000+ posts. The hack works perfectly as advertised but:

I get a bit tired of having this bot as top poster, having all the time new posts problems [moded the search.php so it won't show the forum section where the bot posts in New Posts but than the new posts stats won't correspond to the new posts search page] and having a new thread and new post for each news as this falsifies a lot of forum stats, having to follow forum, thread and topic links instead of having an easy to read page, etc...

Anyway this gives me a new idea about this hack:
I came across this some time ago: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...&page=1&pp=100 [How to create your own vBulletin-powered page] and started toying with the idea of seperating the article bot from the forum soft itself and using this kind of integration to put it back into the forum:
- have article bot "post" into it's own table with a similar structure to the post table;
- create a custom made page and link it to a forum

If haven't started work on this yet and wanted to first ask if there is someone out there who has already been working on a similar idea...

@ MadMan, had a closer look at the code: Although I haven't really looked much at vBull v3.5 yet I think this hack might work with it since it is mainly stand alone. I only checked the structure of the tables which has remained the same. The hack calls a few global vBull variables which, if they have changed, could cause problems. Maybe give it a try on a test board...

I'm a little confused about how to set how frequently the bot posts. I have 1 bot with multiple news feeds. In the feeds settings I set the "Post Interval" setting to 30,40,50 and 60 for different feeds. The cronjob runs every 5 hours. But the bot doesn't post ever 30,40,50 or 60 minutes. Nor does it post every 5 hours. How do I get it to check for new articles every hour and posts them if there are more?

Right now it's only posting 1 time per day.

I did that too, but it didn't resolve the following error:

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Warning: MagpieRSS: Failed to parse RSS file. (syntax error at line 1, column 0) in /articlebot/rss_fetch.inc on line 238

Warning: array_reverse(): The argument should be an array in /articlebot/articlebot.php on line 137

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /articlebot/articlebot.php on line 141
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That error occurs both with Google and Yahoo feeds. Interestingly, it worked a couple of times with Yahoo, but no more!

Any ideas? Is this simply a problem with the RSS format? Google and Yahoo use RSS 2.0 and that should be supported by this hack, right?

Thanks!

Are you sure the cron is set up correctly? For some reason I could never get the cron to work in combination with this hack, it never executed at all. It started working perfectly when I used vB's Scheduled Tasks Manager and instructed it to call the articlebots.php script once an hour.

Pretty sure the cron is working because when I click to run it now, it doesn't error out.

Is there any way to get the bot post to show only after the first post on each page?

Folks-

I'm trying to install this mod (my first), and I got all the way to step seven, then got very confused.

I went to the cpanel on my site, found "chron jobs" but none of the choices i can make there seem to the instruction.

There is a box that asks"Please enter an email address where the cron output will be sent:"
One that asks "Command to run: "
and a bunch of menus that ask minute, hour, day, weekday & month

where do I put the path?

--don

M8, you do that in your AdminCP, see the picts below:

AdminCP -> Scheduled Tasks -> Add New Scheduled Task and then fill out in accordance with my second pict.

Thank you-

I got that done, but now get to the instruction:\

I'm on a shared server, does that path start at my partition (the part I can see) or do I have to start at the server name?

--don