news2vb - Moreover news headlines to vBulletin discussion thread
 

Updated from previous vBulletin 2 version of news2vb.

Hope the instructions at the top of the file are clear, if not please post here.

To install this utility, copy the single PHP file to your vB dir. Edit it and change the password to whatever you wish. Change the yourvbdir variable to the URL pointing to your vB directory.

As demo - here are some sample output threads:

http://www.boards.jp/forums/showthread.php?t=16277
http://www.boards.jp/forums/showthread.php?t=16276

Also, have a look at the menu here:

http://www.boards.jp/forums/news2vb....ion=picksource

This script will generate messages of the following form in whatever forum you wish, using any of the Moreover newsfeeds.

• Yamauchi wants Nintendo in anime biz
  (Gamespot, Sep 29 2004 4:45PM) Discuss
• Anime, Manga New Club's Focus
  (Voices News, Sep 29 2004 8:11AM) Discuss

Changelog

2.0 - 8 December 2004 - Updated for vBulletin 3.0.x; fixed errors in post creation; added TABLE_PREFIX
1.1 - 19 March 2002 - "Post News" output now shows BB code parsed message, URL to thread; fixed missing references to $yourvburl
1.0 - 15 March 2002 - First version of script

So what does the hack do - basically if you call the PHP script with the jaction=picksource command you can see a list of Moreover feeds (www.moreover.com) and a list of your forums, and you can post the headlines into the forum of your choice (as long as you supply the correct password as hardcoded into the script).

Alternatively, you can ignore the categories and perform a custom list of headlines (by searching in the headline keywords or a query through the article text - keyword and query boxes respectively), or you can enter a feed number in the feed box (some unedited Moreover feeds don't have category names - you can see the feed ID number in examples at their site).

You should also be able to generate forum posts from a script, e.g. using wget you would do something like:

Sample screen from the menu is attached.

Any questions, please ask.

Since passing of the title to a new reply no longer works in vB3, if you want the news headline title to propagate to a reply, you will have to add:

to newreply.php after the line:

I like this. :) I'll check it out...

Hi Erwin - yes I remember you tried the old version too (link). Hope it works okay... Moreover went through some changes since I did the previous hack; for a while you couldn't get headlines at all without some paid registration but now they support the headlines by making the first one an advert.

You can easily modify this so that the poster has a userid instead of an unregistered user by the way. That's what I've done. ;)

To make the poster a registered user, do this:

Add a new variable:

Find:

Add under:

Then find:

Replace with:

Done! :)

Yup - I wasn't sure whether people would prefer that or not... Thanks for the updates Erwin!

Replaced some mysql_query's and mysql_fetch_array's with $DB_site->query and $DB_site->fetch_array, and added Erwin's suggestion above.

nice ill try it out.

your sample threads dont work


No Thread specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the webmaster

I was about to say the same thing.. they dont work...

A minor bug fix:

In the file, FIND:

$checkpassword should be $jcheckpassword, otherwise the direct URL does not have the password.

Replace with:

That's it. :)

Thanks Erwin, will update the file now...

Also, thread links updated in original thread.

Are people happy with this?

How do you mean?

Meaning, for people who have installed it, do they like this hack's implementation? Is it working well? I'm debating installing it but I'd like to see more feedback from people.

anyone have this implemented? id like to see it run

Well I have it installed, the three links in the original post show two sample outputs and the last one shows the interface. But I'm not sure what you want to see...

How often are these threads created? I guess I should download it and maybe it will tell me.

edit: I see it runs manually. Can I set it up on a cron job somehow?

Yep you can use crontab -e and wget on unix to set up a job, e.g.

0 8 * * * wget -O /dev/null "http://www.wherever.com/vbulletin/news2vb.php?jaction=postnews&jpassword=blah&jcateg ory=Sports%253A%2520soccer%252 0news&jforum=1"

I've got this running in vB cron. :)

Even better :) Did you have to do anything special Erwin?

I just set the variables in the PHP file itself, since vB Cron does not allow variables in the URL. So you need separate PHP files for each forum/news.

Nice one, thanks a lot . Only one question, can I add more sites to read notices or only moreover ones are supported? If so, how can I add more notices?

Is it possible to get this hack to work with any RSS feed?

No this only works with Moreover CSV feeds.

To make it work with RSS would be slightly more complex; first you'd need to integrate it with MagpieRSS and then use that to produce the items in the list.

Is there a demand for this?