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.

[Velocd]

Anyone got a demo of this in action?

www.animesystem.com/forums/

Bots include:
Kanno, Aspen, Zen, Crowbar

Currently my bots are dominating the forum and will soon have a higher postcount then some of the regulars. Har har. :ermm:

Velocd, does this work when capturing info from an RDF file?
I used the other RSS feed on my site and wanted to capture data from the website - www.uo.com, but they don't have RSS, so I setup a script to capture news from the site and save it as an RSS feed file, a rdf file, but it didn't work with the other RSS mod....

Deimos (and others), be sure to read what you haven't of the entire thread before asking a question.

I answered your question 3 posts above, here.

Can someone tell me why I can't pull this feed?

http://satelliteguys.gottadeal.com/rss.xml

Everything looks ok to me, and my other feeds are working.

<?xml version="1.0" ?> 
- <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"

This is an RDF document.

The MagPieRSS parser this script uses doesn't support RDF. Given the request for RDF, when I have the time I'll see if I can find a version that does, even if it is another RSS/RDF parser.

[Admiral Spock]

Velocd, Thanks for this wonderful hack. However, I can't get it to fetch the RSS feed, and when the cron job ran it gave this error:

Warning: MagpieRSS: Failed to parse RSS file. (mismatched tag at line 1341, column 2) in /home2/beta/public_html/forum/articlebot/rss_fetch.inc on line 230

Warning: array_reverse(): The argument should be an array in /home2/beta/public_html/forum/articlebot/articlebot.php on line 141

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home2/beta/public_html/forum/articlebot/articlebot.php on line 145

Do you have any idea what I may have done wrong? I'm sure it's a problem on my part as I am not good with PHP code. I have the article bot set up, and set to fetch the RSS feed each hour...

Thank you!

[Deimos]

Gah, my apologies Vilo, next time I won't be so lazy as to skip the thread, hehe

[Velocd]

@Admiral Spock: Does it do this error for every RSS feed? If not, link to the RSS feed that gives the error. Maybe you are trying to parse a RSS feed not supported by MagPieRSS parser.. that would give that error. MagpieRSS functions return an array, so those array errors would be result of it not returning anything.

[lanoix]

Thanks for this mod, I will try it... :squareeyed:

[Admiral Spock]

Originally Posted by Velocd

@Admiral Spock: Does it do this error for every RSS feed? If not, link to the RSS feed that gives the error. Maybe you are trying to parse a RSS feed not supported by MagPieRSS parser.. that would give that error. MagpieRSS functions return an array, so those array errors would be result of it not returning anything.

http://www.14wfie.com/global/Categor...clienttype=rss is the feed I used.

But I also used http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories and that didn't work either. But with the Yahoo one, going to /articlebot/articlebot.php brings up just a blank page - no errors.

[Matrixgl]

every newsfeed url given in the install.html file is giving me this error:

PHP Code:

Warning: MagpieRSS: Failed to parse RSS file. (mismatched tag at line 121, column 2) in /path/forums/articlebot/rss_fetch.inc on line 230

Warning: array_reverse(): The argument should be an array in /pathl/forums/articlebot/articlebot.php on line 141

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /path/forums/articlebot/articlebot.php on line 1 


same as admiral...

using vB 3.0.1

[Rob Eh]

[high]* Rob Eh clicked install.
[/high]

I do have a question. How do I delete to comments at the top and bottom of each article posted? They show up on the preview mouseover in the forumdisplay.

PHP Code:

<!-- BEGIN TEMPLATE: articlebot_post -->
Sudan could face international sanctions if it fails to disarm Arab militias responsible for killings

[url="http://www.newsisfree.com/click/i,45270008,838,rss/"]View Full Story[/url]

<!-- END TEMPLATE: articlebot_post --> 


[Matrixgl]

looks like the urls in the install.html file dont really work...

However, I did get many of the urls to work from this site:
http://www.findforward.com/?q=&t=rss

[Velocd]

Version 1.1 has been released.

Refer to the first post for upgrade/installation instructions, and release notes.

If bugs are found, please report them in this post.