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.

[Torqued]

Originally Posted by Tenny

Not sure if this has been posted yet, i'm pretty sure it has, but I don't have time to read 34 pages of messages...


Is there anyway to change it so that the forum the RSS Bot posts in, doesn't come up in the "New Posts" and stuff like that? Becuase the bot is spamming soo much, it's hard to see what has been posted by actual members of the community.

Like this:

Originally Posted by Jake Bunce @ vbulletin.com

You can exclude forums from the search by adding the red code:


http://www.yoursite.com/forum/search.php?do=getnew&exclude=X,Y,Z


Where X,Y,Z is a comma-separated list of forumids you want to exclude.

[Tenny]

sweet thanks! Works like a charm... now i" just gotta edit vbadvanced to add that into the 'latest topics' and i'm pretty sure it'll be a simliar way of doing it. And the Welcome CP back in Vbadvanced... guess i'll do that at work today

thanks agian

[Tenny]

Well I found out in the vBa CMPS there is an option to exclude certain forums, so i did that.

But there still is one problem.

In the Template for vBa CMPS: adv_portal_welcomeblock

<if condition="$vba_options['portal_welcome_newposts']"><a href="$vboptions[bburl]/search.php?$session[sessionurl]do=getnew&exclude=113">$vbphrase[new_posts]</a>: $newposts 	<br /></if>

Well I did the Exclude on the forum I don't want, but the $newposts is just a number, and I don't know how to exclude that. I wouldn't mind but for me I'm sitting there seeing there are 15 new posts, but when I click that, i only see 2 or so threads.

Anyone have any Idea's on how to do that?

[poolking]

Originally Posted by rajc007

Do you mean just the name of the user? It's just Hotel News.

No the userid, i.e. the number of the user.

[yoyoyoyo]

The bot seems to be working fine- great hack! However - it is only bringing back bits and not the full article:



How can I set it to post the full article, and not just the first part. Is that the RSS feed's fault, or is there a setting somewhere to allow it to post the full article?

[Tenny]

That's the RSS Feeds fault

[yoyoyoyo]

Originally Posted by Tenny

That's the RSS Feeds fault

so the trick is finding a good RSS feed I see.. hmmm.. that will be the tricky part

[poolking]

The feeds aren't supposed to post the full article. You could be breaking copyrights if you attempt to post the full article.

[yoyoyoyo]

Originally Posted by poolking

The feeds aren't supposed to post the full article. You could be breaking copyrights if you attempt to post the full article.

I know that, but there is a different between a full article and a broken feed with half a post!

[Torqued]

Originally Posted by poolking

The feeds aren't supposed to post the full article. You could be breaking copyrights if you attempt to post the full article.

Did you know that you can turn searches @ http://search.news.yahoo.com into RSS feeds? do a search and then look for "View as RSS" in the right sidebar.