maybe the template name has a space somewhere

nope, no spaces.

Installed. Very nice.

But. ;)

How can I make it so articlebot's post are NOT immediately posted, but queued for moderation? Is this a small change to an insert query?

Nevermind, I figured it out. Here's what I did.

in articlebot.php

Find:
AFTER it, add:

Find:
REPLACE with:

Find:
AFTER it, add:
That's it. Set the $visible value to 0 to make the articlebot posts moderated. Set it to 1 for the default behavior. Hope that helps someone. I'm not sure if you need to set the post.visible value or not?

Also, what'd I'd really like is if the bot would actually check the permissions of its user in the forum it is posting to and set whether the post should be moderated or not. Actually, it'd probably just be better if you could toggle the "visible" on and off in the articlebot CP.

"Moderating" feeds this ways allows your moderators to control the flow of the feed. Many articles in a feed will be irrelevant or duplications, this way, there's still a human filter on it when necessary.

<< taps fingers and has no idea why rss2 isnt being shown properly.....

i would be amazed if anyone with this installed can show this rss2 feed on their posts and include post text within content:encoded tags

try it:
http://www.ring4tonez.com/sellersfor....php?type=rss2

u will get the post title and thats about it

if you do, please post a link or PM me so i can see for myself :-)

That's why I took the advice of one of the VB guys and changed my incoming feeds to all go to one particular forum; that way anybody with access to the forum can modify/move the new posts as needed.

This is awesome! I have been looking for something like this.

Thanks!

I've been using the new RSS modified FEED hack. The problem with this is that it couldn't accept my source name, of 250 characters. Would the article bot accept this?

Hmm. That could be a better idea depending on how you want your moderators to handle it. Wish I thought of that. ;)

<< must be invisible.....thats twice now ive been passed by.....

Does http://www.ring4tonez.com/sellersfo...l.php?type=rss work? (note the missing '2' from the end)

yes , rss works perfect :-)

but when i try rss2 feed the <description> tag in the rss turns to <content:encoded> in rss2, and the articlebot doesnt show the post...only title of post

so any rss2 format i need to pull down with <content:encoded> tags is pretty useless....but the first post on here says its rss2 compatible etc..

The reason I asked if that worked was to confirm that feeder site was working and your mod was up & running.

The reason the "rss2" feeds don't work is because even though the output identifies itself as "RSS" / "2.0" it appears to be really the RSS 1.0 specs which used the Dublin Core standards. I don't think there is much use out of there of the 1.0 specs. Anyway, if that site is yours you could always modify the external.php file but if you're looking for a more generic solution then you'll need to modify the code in the rss_parse.inc file to look for the "content:encoded" tag under RSS instead of just the ATOM section.

Edit: From playing around with external.php the problem looks like a vbulletin issue, not a hack issue.

Hi all

I installed this but I'm not familiar with setting up a cron job. I want it to check on a daily basis every hour, can someone paste the code I would use.

Thanks

Installed this hack, and i don't have any article bots added. So when i go to Manage Article Bots, i get an standart error Error: No article bots found. Problem is that right above the error box connecting with it a blue line, check out the screenshot. Any way to remove it?

I was also wondering if it's possible to set up execution of articlebot.php through Scheduled Tasks tool in vBulletin AdminCP, if yes, how?

grrr I moved all my sites to a new server and now I get this cron error in my email.

Failed loading /usr/lib/php4/mmcache.so: /usr/lib/php4/mmcache.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

That's because the php isn't installed as standalone version.
You could try to use wget and access the php as a webpage
(replace the php line with the wget line)
example:
wget --no-http-keep-alive -q -O /dev/null http://www.yoursite.com/forums/artic...atriclebot.php

Uninstalled

Your mmcache is in a different directory. Do a locate.

Bump.

Do you have the incoming threads going directly into public forums or into a holding area? Because of the sheer volume of incoming items I'm finding that's it's much better to have the incoming threads in a holding area and then selectively moving some to the public areas.

Works awesome! Great job! :)

*clicks install!

Anyone found out why if articlebot.php is ran (manually thro IE) it gives a blank page?

This is the only problem i'm having - all well apart from that. I suspect this is stopping my bots from posting tho.

Scrap that - it now works.....

I downloaded the latest MagpieRSS files - http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

Uploaded them, checked over articlebot.php again - was ok.

Triead manually running articlebot.php - still a blank screen, so i go into manage article bots to see if its changed and my bots have posted!!

So - may be a dodgy magpieRSS file? Download the newest ones and try again.

It should be a blank page if you're running it manually. If you see something on the screen then it means that an error occurred somewhere. ;)

This says it updates a new thread every (in my case) 10 minutes.

However the cron job is set to 4 hours.

I'm not getting posts unless i run the cron job manually? Once ran manually - i get a couple of posts.

Should my cron job be set to something like every minute?

I'm losing myself quickly here.

Am i right in thinking :

I set my bot to get 6 threads, posting 1 every ten minutes, id need my cron job to run at least once an hour?

So if i set my bot to get 60 threads, posting 1 every ten minutes, id need my cron job to run at least once every 10 hours?

That right?

Just out of interest - i found the new fps_external.php here on vb - making rss more compliant with RSS 2.0 - so i installed that no bother - however :

Any idea why, when using this i get the following error (using it for article bot to make it RSS 2.0 ok) :

Was working ok with original external.php file (using the include option, not cron) - but only really parseing RSS 0.91

Manquish, what the URL of the RSS feed that you're trying to use? If you post it I'll take a look.

Cheers bud - it works but albeit intermittently :

At the moment i'm testing it with the top 6 on here : http://www.7thgear.com/uk/en/services/feed.asp

With the intention of using a few of them.

They are RSS 2.0

I've scrapped the fps_external php too - it works normally - only getting threads through slowly tho.

Well - for whatever reason - it is now working..... Why - i don't know.

One last thing - is it possible to change the link at the bottom of the thread from (for example) :

http://www.whatever.com

to :

Click here to read thie story

Manquish,

You lost me somewhere..... fps_external.php only deals with creating RSS feeds from your site, not to to it. Using or not using fps_external.php would have no affect on this hack unless you were using this hack to get feeds from somebody who happens to be using the fps_external.php hack.

For changing your URL, I think the template "articlebot_post" is what you're after. Try changing it to........ but substitute "[" for "{" & "]" for "}" when you copy & paste it.

Kevin

Why does it only show a small description off the actual news? I saw on another vbulletin forum which grabs news and psots it in a selected forum, as well as ataches an image and the content in the post is alot longer

That sounds extremely interesting... what forum was this on if you don't mind my asking?

I'm having the same problem as SportbikeWorld & bitg, anyone have ideas?

There is the post, the title, but when you click the thread link, nothing is there.

For example: http://www.tehlounge.com/vbb/showthread.php?t=82

Thanks!

It all depends on the content of the XML/RDF/RSS File that you're grabbing. Some of them, have loads of details, and an image. Some don't.

Heres the forum: www.totalformat.com

and also, I use the same RSS Feed as they do, TheRegister!

Help :/

blueuniverse: It's not the feed, I was using this exact same feed earlier yesterday with another RSS BOT for VBulletin, but I didn't like the way it was running, and came across this bot.

Blam Forumz: Wow, just looking at that one, and seeing they have the full article, they must be feeding off a special news rss link imo. Did you ask the admin how he did that by any chance? I'd be very interested also!

I just installed it... mind you I have it link to the index.php page for now... IT works great... so far I've noticed that only one of the entries has been duplicated... we'll see how it is by tomorrow...

One question I have is that all the feeds are very short and contain a link to another site... I hate this as I am giving traffic away to others and not getting much for it...

My question is this, are there any feeds (pay is ok as long as its not a fortune) that would contain more info and maybe images? I am mostly interested in Entertainment feeds... like music, artists, reviews etc...

Any help would be very very much appreciated...

THANX

It looks more like that site is doing a cut & paste.