news2vb - Moreover news headlines to vBulletin discussion thread

Updated from previous vBulletin 2 version of news2vb.

Hope the instructions at the top of the file are clear, if not please post here.

To install this utility, copy the single PHP file to your vB dir. Edit it and change the password to whatever you wish. Change the yourvbdir variable to the URL pointing to your vB directory.

As demo - here are some sample output threads:

http://www.boards.jp/forums/showthread.php?t=16277
http://www.boards.jp/forums/showthread.php?t=16276

Also, have a look at the menu here:

http://www.boards.jp/forums/news2vb....ion=picksource

This script will generate messages of the following form in whatever forum you wish, using any of the Moreover newsfeeds.

• Yamauchi wants Nintendo in anime biz
  (Gamespot, Sep 29 2004 4:45PM) Discuss
• Anime, Manga New Club's Focus
  (Voices News, Sep 29 2004 8:11AM) Discuss

Changelog

2.0 - 8 December 2004 - Updated for vBulletin 3.0.x; fixed errors in post creation; added TABLE_PREFIX
1.1 - 19 March 2002 - "Post News" output now shows BB code parsed message, URL to thread; fixed missing references to $yourvburl
1.0 - 15 March 2002 - First version of script

[Cloud-Warrior]

So what does the hack do - basically if you call the PHP script with the jaction=picksource command you can see a list of Moreover feeds (www.moreover.com) and a list of your forums, and you can post the headlines into the forum of your choice (as long as you supply the correct password as hardcoded into the script).

Alternatively, you can ignore the categories and perform a custom list of headlines (by searching in the headline keywords or a query through the article text - keyword and query boxes respectively), or you can enter a feed number in the feed box (some unedited Moreover feeds don't have category names - you can see the feed ID number in examples at their site).

You should also be able to generate forum posts from a script, e.g. using wget you would do something like:

set url = http://www.wherever.com/vbulletin/news2vb.php
wget -O /dev/null "$url?jaction=postnews&jpassword=cloudbot&jcategor y=Arts%2520and%2520culture%2520news&jforum=21"
wget -O /dev/null "$url?jaction=postnews&jpassword=cloudbot&jfeed=15 771&jtitle=Buffy+news&jforum=93"
wget -O /dev/null "$url?jaction=postnews&jpassword=cloudbot&jkeyword s=lord+of+the+rings&jforum=103"
wget -O /dev/null "$url?jaction=postnews&jpassword=cloudbot&jquery=% 22babylon+5%22&jforum=93"

Sample screen from the menu is attached.

Any questions, please ask.

[Cloud-Warrior]

Since passing of the title to a new reply no longer works in vB3, if you want the news headline title to propagate to a reply, you will have to add:

PHP Code:

if ($title == '') { $title = $_REQUEST['title']; } 


to newreply.php after the line:

PHP Code:

$title = $newpost['title']; 


[Erwin]

I like this. I'll check it out...

[Cloud-Warrior]

Hi Erwin - yes I remember you tried the old version too (link). Hope it works okay... Moreover went through some changes since I did the previous hack; for a while you couldn't get headlines at all without some paid registration but now they support the headlines by making the first one an advert.

[Erwin]

You can easily modify this so that the poster has a userid instead of an unregistered user by the way. That's what I've done.

[Erwin]

To make the poster a registered user, do this:

Add a new variable:

Find:

PHP Code:

// Unregistered username to post as
$jfromwho = "CloudBot"; 


Add under:

PHP Code:

// Userid - keep 0 for unregistered
$juserid = "0"; 


Then find:

PHP Code:

  '".addslashes($jfromwho)."',
  '0', 


Replace with:

PHP Code:

  '".addslashes($jfromwho)."',
  '$juserid', 


Done!

[Cloud-Warrior]

Yup - I wasn't sure whether people would prefer that or not... Thanks for the updates Erwin!

[Cloud-Warrior]

Replaced some mysql_query's and mysql_fetch_array's with $DB_site->query and $DB_site->fetch_array, and added Erwin's suggestion above.

[Lethal]

nice ill try it out.