Selecting Threads for RSS Feeds

[medicalforums]

This seems to be a strange request but here's why;

Am pulling feeds from my vB forums website into Twitter, Facebook, and Widgetbox. More often than not, there are members who are posting silly new threads (which I think is the case in any forum site), these threads get fed into those pages I listed above which is quite embarrassing and downgrading my public pages. They will be there even after I delete them because I believe once the thread is published it will immediately go to the RSS feed.

I don't want to moderate new threads because this will hinder visitors from freely posting.
I don't want to create a special "hidden" forum (with good threads copied in it) and then use its RSS feed because then clicks on those public pages will land onto the hidden forum.

Is there any way that I can choose (manually, not by filters) which threads to be included in an RSS feed which then I can send to my public pages?

Thanks

[Lynne]

There is no default vb method to go pick and choose manually which threads get fed to the rss feed. You can choose to only feed from certain forums, but you cannot choose which threads.

[medicalforums]

That's why am asking for a modification or hack or even any external software that can do the job!

Another mechanism that can help is to set the cron job to retrieve feeds once every 24 hours so that I have time to delete the spam and unwanted threads

Can you help me how to set that?

[Lynne]

Well, the forum to ask for a modification to be written is the Modifications Requests forums - either Paid or Unpaid. This forum is the general "can I do this" or "what is the proper setting in vbulletin to do this..." forum and I was answering that you can't do it with default vbulletin. You will need to write a product to most likely - add a new column to the thread table and then modify the external.php page to only 'feed' threads where that column is set to true.

As for only retrieving feeds every 24 hours.... you said you were pulling the feeds from your vbulletin site. So, if you want to change how often you retrieve the feed, you need to modify the script that retrieves the feed, which is not a vbulletin script. I have no idea what script it is, but you can try asking for help on whatever site you got the script from to see about only pulling it every so often.

[medicalforums]

Sorry for posting in the wrong forum, I posted here because I did not intend to request for a mod but I was only looking for any possible solution.

So http://www.mysite.com/external.php?type=rss2 does not use a vBulletin script!

[Lynne]

external.php is the vbulletin script for the rss feed, so I'm not sure what you mean it isn't using a vbulletin script.

[medicalforums]

Originally Posted by Lynne

As for only retrieving feeds every 24 hours.... you said you were pulling the feeds from your vbulletin site. So, if you want to change how often you retrieve the feed, you need to modify the script that retrieves the feed, which is not a vbulletin script. I have no idea what script it is, but you can try asking for help on whatever site you got the script from to see about only pulling it every so often.

You said that retrieving feeds from vb site is not a vb sript

What am doing is using external.php to send feeds to my twitter account, in other words I entered the external.php URL in twitterfeed

Can I set external.php to send those feeds only once in 24 hours?

[Lynne]

There are two scripts here needed.... one to send the rss feed, one to retrieve it and use it. Like in vbulletin, you can take another feed from another site (some.other.site/rssscript.xml) and then import it into your site via a vbulletin script (rssposter.php). So, one script to send, one to retrieve - in this case the retriever is a vbulletin script. In your case, you are sending from vbulletin (via external.php) and retrieving via some other script on twitter or facebook or wherever. If you have control of both scripts (both the sending and retrieving scripts), then you can modify either. If you only have control of the sending script (external.php), then you will have to modify it. Every time you 'call' that script, it runs the query for the new threads. So, you would have to somehow put some condition on the query to only grab threads that are no younger than 24 hours ago. Kinda a weird modification to the query. I suppose it could be done, but I don't write queries for others (I'm a trial and error query writer).

[medicalforums]

Thanks Lynne,
I was able to modify twitterfeed to check the feed only once every 24 hours
Will be working on Facebook and Widgetbox for a similar solutions

I will definitely leave the vB sender alone (as I don't want to mess with queries )

You've been really helpful, thanks again

[medicalforums]

Lynne,

You should have pointed me to this!

admincp > vboptions > external data provider

and set the Cache lifespan to 1440 minutes which means 24 hours