news2vb - Moreover news headlines to vBulletin discussion thread

Hope the instructions at the top are clear, if not please post here.

To install this utility, copy the single PHP file to your vB dir. Edit it and change the password to whatever you wish. Change the yourvbdir variable to the URL pointing to your vB directory.

As demo - here are some sample output threads:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showt...threadid=44475
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showt...threadid=44522

Also, have a look at the menu here:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/news2...ion=picksource

This script will generate messages of the following form in whatever forum you wish, using any of the Moreover newsfeeds.

• Microsoft s Xbox Fails To Wow Japanese Market
  (osOpnion, Mar 13 2002 8:17AM) Discuss
• Xbox - dont believe the hype
  (IT-Director.com, Mar 13 2002 1:33AM) Discuss

Changelog

1.1 - "Post News" output now shows BB code parsed message, URL to thread
1.1 - Fixed missing references to $yourvburl

[Cloud-Warrior]

Weird, seems to work for my forum - what's your URL?

[Cloud-Warrior]

Yeah it's strange that the icon is not being shown properly in your threadlisting Erwin, did you use an ID number that is shown via PHPMyAdmin - it may not be the same as the icon name - e.g. my iconid 37 corresponds to icon14.gif.

No icon is being set, I guess to solve the broken image at least you can set the iconid to 0 (none will appear). This is what is being shown in your threadlisting

PHP Code:

<img src="" alt="" width="15" height="15" border="0"> 


Word Wrap Bug

Another thing to note is that you may notice a break occuring somewhere in the middle of the Discuss URL or the Discuss text - you will either have to set your Word Wrap to a large value or else to 0 to stop this.

[Erwin]

Originally posted by Cloud-Warrior
No icon is being set, I guess to solve the broken image at least you can set the iconid to 0 (none will appear). This is what is being shown in your threadlisting

Changing iconid to "0" fixed it. The default icon shows up now which is what I want anyway!

Another thing to note is that you may notice a break occuring somewhere in the middle of the Discuss URL or the Discuss text - you will either have to set your Word Wrap to a large value or else to 0 to stop this. [/B]

I changed Word Wrap to "0" and it fixed that problem too.


Thanks!


I am now trying to get my crontab to work - it is not working for some reason.

This is my cron command line:

0 0 * * *  wget -O /dev/null "http://www.mysite.com/forum/news2vb.php?jaction=postnews&jpassword=mypassword&jcategory=Whatever%2520news&jforum=1&jtitle=My+News"

I would expect it to run every 24 hours at midnight server time, but it hasn't for some reason. (I have replaced the site, password and forum details with something else for obvious reasons).

Any ideas?

[Cloud-Warrior]

I can't see anything wrong with that crontab, maybe try changing it to 59 23 to see what happens. I noticed your posts are occuring at 8.25 which doesn't match up to midnight by any stretch of the imagination...

[Erwin]

No, I am doing those news inserts manually... the crontab ain't working!

I'll try your suggestion...

Is there another way I can set up crontab to do this?

[Cloud-Warrior]

Maybe you need to specify the full path to wget... Try a whereis wget. Alternatively you can use lynx if it is installed, in your crontab you'd probably do something like (specifying the full path to lynx as well):

0 7 * * * TERM=vt100 /path/to/lynx -source "http://..." >> /dev/null

I've added one or two things to the Post News output, modified file at the top.

[Erwin]

Aha!!!

I have lynx, and I use that to run my USENET crontab, so there you go, this is going to work - I did try it with yours, but I did not put the TERM variable in.

Will let you know if it does work.

Downloaded and using the new news2vb.php file - the output is heaps better! Thanks!

Just one small bug:

You have $yourvbdir at the top but $yourvburl in the code.

Change the $vbdir to $vburl or vice versa for the "Discuss" links to work.

Thanks heaps!

[Cloud-Warrior]

Actually I think it should now say yourvburl in both, I'm guessing it was yourvbdir in version 1.0. Either way, glad it's working - time to move to Full Hacks I think.

[Wayne Luke]

I installed this and plan on making a few changes to make it more robust and more suited to my needs. Thanks.

[Cloud-Warrior]

Thanks Wayne, if you think any of the changes should be implemented for all installers, please let me know.