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This is something I originally made about 4 years ago.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).

[compuminus]

Hi Shawn, I've been using this mod in my forums for several months now, and many members have been reporting intermittent outages with the page. It isn't browser or location specific, but has been happening quite a lot, and I've been really struggling to isolate the cause. To make matters worse, I've almost never been able to see this happening at my end (but am 100% sure it is happening to lots of other members).

The page still loads (and the rest of the site works fine), but the latest events will appear empty and nothing scrolls. Even when they refresh, nothing appears until perhaps several hours later. No particular event/post is known to trigger this, and the digitalpoint_spy table is fully populated and is getting updated correctly. The server load is also never very high. I suspect that this could be happening on other sites as well, but my site members just use the page so heavily that they notice the 5-10% of the time that it is happening.

getXML/processXML/push aren't working under certain conditions. Could it have to do with their function timings? Any ideas? Here's some of the customized timings:

var fadetime = .25;
var pushtime = 300;
var fadetime_end = 1.5;
var pushtime_end = 4000

Any help here would be greatly appreciated...

[digitalpoint]

No, blog entries lack the hooks necessary to make it work for them. Plus, how often would you really see a new blog entry stream by compared to a new post?

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by compuminus

Hi Shawn, I've been using this mod in my forums for several months now, and many members have been reporting intermittent outages with the page. It isn't browser or location specific, but has been happening quite a lot, and I've been really struggling to isolate the cause. To make matters worse, I've almost never been able to see this happening at my end (but am 100% sure it is happening to lots of other members).

The page still loads (and the rest of the site works fine), but the latest events will appear empty and nothing scrolls. Even when they refresh, nothing appears until perhaps several hours later. No particular event/post is known to trigger this, and the digitalpoint_spy table is fully populated and is getting updated correctly. The server load is also never very high. I suspect that this could be happening on other sites as well, but my site members just use the page so heavily that they notice the 5-10% of the time that it is happening.

getXML/processXML/push aren't working under certain conditions. Could it have to do with their function timings? Any ideas? Here's some of the customized timings:

var fadetime = .25;
var pushtime = 300;
var fadetime_end = 1.5;
var pushtime_end = 4000

Any help here would be greatly appreciated...

Would be a little difficult to debug if you don't see it happening and I can't see it happening. Can you get one of them to take a screenshot or something when it happens? Maybe some error with the one of the text interfering with the XML transport or something. I've been meaning to move it over to just use the internal vB_XML_Builder class, which should solve any issues with the AJAX crapping out if strange characters somehow made their way into it.

[AusPhotography]

Installed and working on vB4.0.7

[NovoCiv]

Works. About a minute delay, but it will serve it's purpose. Thanks!

[8thos]

This would great if I could choose which usergroups are able to use this feature but since I cannot, I am uninstalling.

[SİMAR]

thanks install super man

[MonsterDK]

I have posted here previously about the problem I had with this script.
But I did not get much response.

I will try again...

I get the same BLANK page. Nothing is showing. I have the SPY template and SPY.CSS.

I have just checked my database via phpmyadmin and I can't see the digitalpoint_spy table.

It would be listed down the left side panel in phpmyadmin with the long list?

[preemz10314]

Originally Posted by MonsterDK

I have posted here previously about the problem I had with this script.
But I did not get much response.

I will try again...

I get the same BLANK page. Nothing is showing. I have the SPY template and SPY.CSS.

I have just checked my database via phpmyadmin and I can't see the digitalpoint_spy table.

It would be listed down the left side panel in phpmyadmin with the long list?

you might have installed wrong or are pointing to the wrong url , or maybe you installed it but forgot to enable it in the admincp?

mine is http://www.digitalbrass.com/spy.php and as you can see it works fine... maybe you are seeing a blank page because there is no activity on your forum? either that or you are pointing to the wrong URL to view it.

[MonsterDK]

Originally Posted by preemz10314

you might have installed wrong or are pointing to the wrong url , or maybe you installed it but forgot to enable it in the admincp?

mine is http://www.digitalbrass.com/spy.php and as you can see it works fine... maybe you are seeing a blank page because there is no activity on your forum? either that or you are pointing to the wrong URL to view it.

There is activity on my forum and I am viewing the correct URL.

thanks