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.

[BeePee]

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...

[BeePee]

@ 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...

[Gutspiller]

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.

[tm3500]

Originally Posted by yellowchaser

Fixed the problem, updated to the latest Magpie files at http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/ and it works with no errors now

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

-------------------------------------------------
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
-------------------------------------------------

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!

[tm3500]

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.

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.

[Gutspiller]

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

Originally Posted by tm3500

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.

[Fallback]

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

[darnoldy]

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.

In the crontab you will have to provide the path to the articlebot.php script, but first with the path to the php executable. Here is the syntax:

/usr/local/bin/php /path/to/forums/articlebot/articlebot.php

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

[BeePee]

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.

[darnoldy]

Originally Posted by BeePee

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:\

Set the path between the single quotes to the absolute server path to your forums.
e.g. /home/cjohn/public_html/forums/

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