Miscellaneous Hacks - Digital Point Spy

About
This is a Digg-style spy for seeing what's going on in your forum in realtime.

This is something I originally made about 4 years ago. Now that I rewrote it for vBulletin 4 (it also now uses the bundled YUI for animation), I decided to also wrap it up as a product package and release it for the world to use.

Installation

• Put the spy.php file in your forum folder.
• Put the digitalpoint_spy.js file in your clientscript folder.
• Install the product-digitalpoint_spy.xml product under AdminCP -> Plugins & Products -> Manage Products -> Add/Import Product

You can see a live version in action here:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/spy.php


1.1.0 Update

• Moved JavaScript to external file (works around template parsing bug with early versions of vBulletin 4.0.x).
• XML generation is done with vBulletin's XML Builder class (let it deal with weird characters).
• Switched JavaScript library to from YUI to jQuery (for an end user, it means better animations).
• Changed do=xml to do=feed (works around servers that are overly protective and think they are trying to be hacked and blocking the request).

[Kolbi]

nice...

[civil78]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

CPU load is minimal. It uses it's own tracking table for recent events so that SQL queries are kept very simple. We run this on a large, high traffic forum and the server load between running it and not running it isn't something you can tell the difference between.

Also, if you want to test the server load manually, just go to spy.php?do=xml and reload as fast as you can (or setup a process to hit it continuously). That is the underlying AJAX call used to get new events.

Thanks for the informations, I will test it .

[Boofo]

Originally Posted by civil78

Thanks for the informations, I will test it .

Please let us know what you find out.

[teenage.vn]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

What's the URL?

http://forum.teenage.vn/spy.php

Here we go, please check it out ...

I have installed the xml file as well ...

[carubmun]

I currently use the iSpy someone else worked up, i got it working alright with vb4 here.

Im wondering if your version can be deployed inside another page, not have it be its own separate page is it currently works.
I want to put it inside a tab, or maybe even on straight up on forumhome.
Would that be possible?

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by teenage.vn

http://forum.teenage.vn/spy.php

Here we go, please check it out ...

I have installed the xml file as well ...

Looks like maybe the 2 templates it installs didn't get installed or something? Do you have a template named "SPY" in your template system?

Originally Posted by carubmun

I currently use the iSpy someone else worked up, i got it working alright with vb4 here.

Im wondering if your version can be deployed inside another page, not have it be its own separate page is it currently works.
I want to put it inside a tab, or maybe even on straight up on forumhome.
Would that be possible?

In the current form, no. But something similar (and some other stuff) is something I was already playing around with internally for a future version.

[carubmun]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

In the current form, no. But something similar (and some other stuff) is something I was already playing around with internally for a future version.

Good to know.
Im guessing there is no minor adjustments that can be made to this in order to make it appear within a particular page and not only on its own page.

Since you plan on expanding on it, may i give another suggestion...
I find that it would work very nicely if it could be harnessed in a way similar to a "recent activity" or "latest posts" type widget.
Except that this one appears in real time while the others are pretty much static.
What would be needed most for that is to be able to add in which forums to include.
The iSpy mod allows you to add in which forums to exclude, nice option... but a real pain in the ass when you have an incredibly large amount of forums and subforums.
And having it work as a widget would be nice too

[digitalpoint]

A widget block was already planned as part of the "some other stuff" statement.

As far as filtering forums, you can do it based on subscribed forums already.

[goran424]

I installed, tried everything but just doesn't work. Keep getting following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '{', expecting ')' in /home/ghostrider/domains/ghostriders-thailand.com/public_html/forum/includes/class_core.php(4040) : eval()'d code on line 32

I'm using vBulletin 4.0.2 Patch Level 4 if that means anything.

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by goran424

I installed, tried everything but just doesn't work. Keep getting following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '{', expecting ')' in /home/ghostrider/domains/ghostriders-thailand.com/public_html/forum/includes/class_core.php(4040) : eval()'d code on line 32

I'm using vBulletin 4.0.2 Patch Level 4 if that means anything.

I suspect it's related to this vBulletin bug that was fixed in 4.0.3 (vBulletin versions before 4.0.3 parse some JavaScript in templates incorrectly). To get around it for an old version of vB, you could probably change the function play_pause() in the SPY template to this:

[noparse]function play_pause() {
	var label = new Array('[/noparse]{vb:rawphrase click_to_continue}[noparse]', '[/noparse]{vb:rawphrase click_to_pause}[noparse]');
	play = Math.abs(1-play);
	document.getElementById("play_pause").innerHTML = label[play];
}[/noparse]

Basically adding annoying noparse tags all over the place to tell the parser how to actually parse it. The better solution would be to upgrade to vBulletin 4.0.3 since it can parse templates properly.

I didn't test that hack since I don't have an old version of vBulletin installed, but it should work (although I'm not sure if there are other areas of the template it may not be able to parse properly).