Article Bot

Article Bot
by velocd


Article Bot is a script that allows you to assign a user account (preferably an exclusive one) to an article bot that will post RSS feeds in select forums at designated intervals. These articles are derived from RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.

RSS files are assigned to article bots, as well to individual forums, which in turn directs what, when and where your article bot will post.

Features

• Works with RSS versions: 0.9x, 2.0, 1.0, and Atom 0.3
• AdminCP interface for adding/modifying/deleting article bots & rss feeds
• Designate intervals (in minutes) to each RSS feed for when your article bot will post them.
• Requires only 1 file edit (admincp/index.php), allowing ease of upgrading your vBulletin
  without having to remodify files.
• Easy to install. Works best in conjunction with crontab (contab help is inside install.html)

News

• 7/25/04 - Version 1.1 Released
  • Bug Fixes
    • Replaced htmlspecialchars() with htmlentities() in articlebot.php to fully convert special entities from descriptions.
    • Added trim() to thread titles, to prevent double threads from being posted that are merely off by whitespace.
    • New table articlebot_rss_cache for storing a copy of article bot threads, for quicker checking of doubles when posting new threads.
    • Threads are checked in articlebot_rss_cache, so you can permanently remove them from the thread table (you don't have to "soft delete") without worrying about the bot replicating them.
    • Other minor bugs.
  • Features
    • New installer/upgraders for doing the SQL part automatically.
    • Added "label" field to add/modify RSS interface, that allows you to tag a label, e.g. [yahoo], to the beginning of threads, unique to each RSS feed. This might help for better distinction of RSS feeds.
    • Added an option to toggle on/off of building similar threads per RSS feed. Some RSS feeds could hault the script if the building of similar thread results for that feed takes too long (maybe the article thread title is too vague, and matches a lot of results--my guess is it's only a problem on large forums).
    • Added an option to toggle on/off skipping of articles that don't contain descriptions.
    • Regular expression search and replace for article titles and descriptions. This grants you much flexability to filter out things you don't want in your titles or descriptions (given you have some regex experience, I will try to post some patterns in due time.. feel free to add yours )
• 7/11/04 - Version 1.0 Released

Upgrading

• To upgrade, reupload the new PHP and MagpieRSS parser files to their places on your server. Upload upgrade_vx-x (replace the x's with the version you are upgrading to) to /path/to/forums/admincp/, and then execute that script.

Files

• 3 screenshots attached
• articlebot_v1.zip
  • install.html, logo.gif
  • articlebot_admin.php
  • articlebot/
    • rss_cache.inc
    • rss_fetch.inc
    • rss_parse.inc
    • rss_utils.inc
    • extlib/
      • Snoopy.class.inc

RSS Feeds

There are several in the install.html, but if you're looking for more than you could ever want, check out NewsIsFree's directory:

http://www.newsisfree.com/sources/bycat/


Remember to click install if you use this hack.

Also be sure to read through the what you haven't of the thread before asking a question, for it may have been answered.

[mobilephonegame]

Originally Posted by KW802

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..

[KW802]

Originally Posted by mobilephonegame

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.

[cogimo]

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

[djohn]

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?

[djohn]

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?

[venomx]

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

[puredj]

Originally Posted by venomx

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

[58sniper]

Uninstalled

[Erwin]

Originally Posted by venomx

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

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

[RetroDreams]

Originally Posted by RetroDreams

Anyone found a way to keep Articlebot posts from spamming recent threads, and being returned when searching the forums via "New Posts"?

I'd love to re-enable this.

Bump.