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This is something I originally made about 4 years ago.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

[chrisbjax]

Any possibility of using this to echo on a page outside of vbulletin?

from here...
http://webpage.com/forum/index.php

to here...
http://webpage.com/index.php

[dutchbb]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

CPU load is minimal. It uses it's own tracking table for recent events so that SQL queries are kept very simple. We run this on a large, high traffic forum and the server load between running it and not running it isn't something you can tell the difference between.

Also, if you want to test the server load manually, just go to spy.php?do=xml and reload as fast as you can (or setup a process to hit it continuously). That is the underlying AJAX call used to get new events.

Is it backwards compatible (3.8 series) please?

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by chrisbjax

Any possibility of using this to echo on a page outside of vbulletin?

from here...
http://webpage.com/forum/index.php

to here...
http://webpage.com/index.php

Not even sure what that means to be honest... The Spy itself doesn't care what the URL it's running on, so should work fine on any URL you put it as long as your vB framework is available there of course.

Originally Posted by dutchbb

Is it backwards compatible (3.8 series) please?

Nope, 4.x only.

[Methok]

Originally Posted by Alan_SP

It's easy. Find plugin "Add Spy Link To Navigation" where you call link to it and use this condition around calling spy.php:

<vb:if condition="is_member_of($bbuserinfo,5,6,7)">

Now plugin should look like:

$template_hook['navbar_community_menu_end'] .= '<vb:if condition="is_member_of($bbuserinfo,5,6,7)"><li><a href="spy.php' . $session['sessionurl_q'] . '" target="_blank">' . $vbphrase['spy'] . '</a></li></vb:if>';

Of course, 5,6,7 are usergroups you want to allow access.

Yeah I couldn't get that to work, Also would that just hide the link rather than not allowing access to spy.php?

So if they just typed the URL they would find it?

[Alan_SP]

People rarely know what you have installed on server, so hiding link is as good as disabling in many cases. But to disable people from using some mode, it needs mod reprogramming, that mod itself checks who's trying to use it.

[Eq4bits]

Is there any reason this is no longer working for me? I've had it installed since it first came out (I think) but just recently upgraded to 4.1.4 and now it doesn't appear to work =S

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by Eq4bits

Is there any reason this is no longer working for me?

Nothing on the addon side, no.

[Eq4bits]

eh. Perhaps a conflict with another mod then =\

[Eq4bits]

seems to be a conflict with my custom 'style' =S dang it

[8thos]

Yeah it was working for me but not anymore. Not sure which mod is conflicting with it.