Miscellaneous Hacks - Digital Point Spy

About
This is a Digg-style spy for seeing what's going on in your forum in realtime.

This is something I originally made about 4 years ago. Now that I rewrote it for vBulletin 4 (it also now uses the bundled YUI for animation), I decided to also wrap it up as a product package and release it for the world to use.

Installation

• Put the spy.php file in your forum folder.
• Put the digitalpoint_spy.js file in your clientscript folder.
• Install the product-digitalpoint_spy.xml product under AdminCP -> Plugins & Products -> Manage Products -> Add/Import Product

You can see a live version in action here:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/spy.php


1.1.0 Update

• Moved JavaScript to external file (works around template parsing bug with early versions of vBulletin 4.0.x).
• XML generation is done with vBulletin's XML Builder class (let it deal with weird characters).
• Switched JavaScript library to from YUI to jQuery (for an end user, it means better animations).
• Changed do=xml to do=feed (works around servers that are overly protective and think they are trying to be hacked and blocking the request).

[NovoCiv]

But see, I don't want to run that code globally. If I do that the moderators can't communicate with the hide hack because it's always replaced with "Message Hidden".

Is there a way to create a new hook located inside spy.php?

[digitalpoint]

No clue what a hide hack is. But if you need to run some special code only on the spy page for whatever reason, couldn't you just check to see if THIS_SCRIPT == 'spy' and then run it if it is?

[OcR Envy]

Hey digitalpoint,

Any way to update the links to have vbseo parse them? I realize the whole client side / server side just looking for a suggestion.

[digitalpoint]

Not that I know of. Doesn't vbseo redirect automatically to it's special URL?

[OcR Envy]

Sure it does but I don't want it to 301

function text2seo(text) {
    text=text.replace(/[^a-z-A-Z-0-9]+/g,'-');
    text=text.toLowerCase();
    return text;
}

Then edit the js file to match your url structure, not easy but works.


Ever think about tracking other events like article, blogs etc.. ?

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by OcR Envy

Sure it does but I don't want it to 301

function text2seo(text) {
    text=text.replace(/[^a-z-A-Z-0-9]+/g,'-');
    text=text.toLowerCase();
    return text;
}

Then edit the js file to match your url structure, not easy but works.


Ever think about tracking other events like article, blogs etc.. ?

Truthfully, it doesn't matter a ton if it redirects. The instances that people actually click something from the scrolling spy are pretty rare. And it doesn't muck with search engines because the feed is coming from an AJAX request that is built from JavaScript. And even then the underlying AJAX response is nothing more than numbers (not URLs). So a search engine or any other automated process aren't going to be seeing the content that is withIn the scrolling area.

And yeah... Would like to support additional events, but can't until vBulletin adds hook locations that would support it.

[OcR Envy]

Understandable and agreeable on both, I just like pretty links.

[AusPhotography]

FYI 'Report Post' does not log under vB4.1.2.
I'll have a look at it this week

[digitalpoint]

Reported Post still works fine for me under 4.1.2.

[nerowolfe]

Hi

is perfect for me.

How I can delete the voice in submenu Community>"Spy"?

Thank to all!

EDIT: it's ok now. Ty