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.

[permabanned.net]

Originally Posted by erikxxon

When i try to Add Article Bot I get this Error message?
What does it mean?

Do i have to create a member on the forum first with this "Bot name"?



ErikXXon
Ill have VB 3.0.3

I had the same problem at first. You need to use the numerical user ID e.g. "12" not the user name when you set it up in Add Article Bot. After you have that set up with the number, it should display the user name

There are probably a dozen different ways to do it, but to find the number, I went to Admin CP -> Users -> Search for Users -> Show All Users and then just let the pointer "hover" over the User link in the left hand column, the last part of the link will say something like "userid=12" where "12" is the numerical user ID in this case.

The question for the user is: Do you want feeds to show up as posts belonging to some user? For the set up with My Furl, it kind of makes sense to have web links that I added show up as from my user, but for many kinds of feeds, it is probably better to set up some bogus user like "Articlebot" and have the posts show up as belonging to that user.

You probably also want to create a New Forum where the articles will go rather than having them posted to another, already existing forum. When you create the forum, you may want to think about whether to "Count Posts Made in this Forum Towards User Post Counts." I decided to leave that "Yes" since people might post replies to some of the articles that show up. However, some people can get ridiculously competetive about post counts and might complain that it is "unfair" so keep that in mind

[permabanned.net]

Originally Posted by School-Help

Why does it ask us to use /usr/local/bin/php ? :speechless: infront of the actual path?

Why don't you just try typing in the path to the PHP script on the command line and see what happens cron usually uses "sh" or "bash" to process commands in crontab, and those command shells may have no idea what to do with a PHP script, so you may actually have to invoke the PHP executable to process the PHP script

As someone else said, you could use "wget" (if it's installed on your web server) and point it to the URL instead if you prefer, and that should work just as well. The script has got to be parsed by PHP one way or another, it is not an executable binary, it is just a bunch of PHP commands. The only difference is what way you use to get PHP to process the script.

[permabanned.net]

Originally Posted by School-Help

can someone please help me find the Path to my php executable. I think it is

/usr/local/lib/ but when i use this as the value on the cron job it does not work as i get the email /usr/local/lib/ is a directory. When replace path/to/forums/articlebot/articlebot.php do we use the full path? someone please help!

Try this:

tcsh -c "which php"

or

csh -c "which php"

[permabanned.net]

Is it possible to exclude some user from showing up in New Posts? If I could do that, then I could just exclude the Articlebot user from new posts, and that would work too.

[permabanned.net]

I found this mod to the navbar template that's supposed to let you exclude forum(s) from New Posts, going to give it a try...
exclude forum(s) from New Posts

[Torqued]

Just installed. Works great!

[Torqued]

Originally Posted by permabanned.net

Is it possible to exclude some user from showing up in New Posts? If I could do that, then I could just exclude the Articlebot user from new posts, and that would work too.

Does anyone have a way to exclude article bots from being considered for the "top poster" stats?


also:

Originally Posted by dethfire

I can't get this to work, tried it with yahoo and bbc feeds, doesn't seem to get anything, I run the script and the page is blank with the text "ArticleBOT"

If you just installed it, I think you need to wait until there are new articles on your RSS feeds that are after the time you first ran it.

I checked the feeds I was going to use with a desktop RSS reader. My articlebots would not import information from the feeds the first time I ran it, but once new articles were added to the feeds after I ran my Articlebots the first time, the articles would then show up.

(someone please correct me if I am wrong, but that seemed to be the case with my install. If this is the case, it would be a good piece of info to include in the install notes...)

[berberber]

Hi, it is quite cool .... one thing i dont understand is why it does not work with the cron system of VB ? is there a way to do that ?

[poolking]

Originally Posted by berberber

Hi, it is quite cool .... one thing i dont understand is why it does not work with the cron system of VB ? is there a way to do that ?

Do you mean a cron job to get new articles from the feed?

[Torqued]

I have encountered an interesting post display order issue...

I have one of my articlebots retrieve 5 articles at a time, when it does that, the posts displayed @ forumdisplay are ordered like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101
http://www.mydomain.com/forums/showthread.php?t=102
http://www.mydomain.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103
http://www.mydomain.com/forums/showthread.php?t=104
http://www.mydomain.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105

The problem with that is that the 5th post down is really the most recent post. This is a little confusing because @ the index.php, the thread "t=105" is shown as the "Last Post", but once the user enters the forum (forumdisplay.php), the thread "t=101" appears to be the most recent/last posted thread.

Any ideas on how to get bot to enter the posts in the correct order?