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.

[Velocd]

Ah yeah, enjoy the modification.

[MindTrix]

This looks great well done and thanks, Does this mean we have to like write articles or can it automatically pull them from another site or something?

[Velocd]

It pulls articles from RSS feeds. RSS is a xml format primarily used for syndicating news. Many news related sites provide RSS files of their recently posted articles so their readers can use an RSS aggregator (e.g. http://www.sharpreader.net) to read the data.

With PHP's XML libraries, parsing RSS is done very easily.

Sample RSS:
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories

Anyhow, you first create an article bot, by assigning it a user it will control.

You add an RSS feed by specifying the path to the RSS file, the article bot it applies to, the forum the thread will be posted in, and an interval (in minutes) that a new thread will be posted.

It's preferred that you use a crontab to execute the articlebot.php file, every couple hours or so. The script will work from the bottom of the RSS file (oldest articles) to the top (latest articles). It will post the title of the article as the thread subject, and then the RSS description as the body content. It then tags the URL to the actual full article.

I've had it running on my forum for about 2 weeks, and it works quite well. Make the intervals quite large, like every 5 hours, or else you'll have a flood of bot threads on your forum. This of course depends on the RSS feed and how often the news source updates it.

Hopefully I didn't make things more convoluted.

[Dan]

Nice I like this a lot

[Erwin]

There is another hack just like this one that I installed a month or two ago. How is this different to that one? Just wondering.

[Velocd]

Hm, I didn't know others existed.

Well, it's different in that it's coded by another person.

Feature wise, you'll just have to try it out. Article bots can have unlimited RSS feeds assigned to them, and RSS feeds can be in multiple forums. Meaning, 1 article bot can post in many forums. Not sure if the other RSS mods are restricted of this.

It's very query efficient also.

[alkatraz]

cool

Is there a way to create an RSS feed from your site, for other sites with this hack? (ie: new events on my forum automaticaly get RSS'd to other sites)

[Reeve of shinra]

alkatraz - I could be mistaken but I believe thats a default feature of vb3. Check the online manual for it.

[alkatraz]

crazy, just checked the vb3 manual..

thx