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This is something I originally made about 4 years ago.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).

[jefferis]

Originally Posted by Boofo

It should follow forum permissions. Look at it as a guest.

Yes, Great! Thanks

[digitalpoint]

Right... as mentioned, it only shows stuff from the forums the user has permission to view, so you don't need to make special permissions for it.

[New Joe]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

The 1.1.0 version I just uploaded should handle non-standard characters better. Go ahead and try it out and let me know.

Thanks for your work digitalpoint, I have just installed your up-dated one and it works great.
I left it for 3 hours and it up-dated every post and thread fine.

I still miss the 'Times' of the posts or threads which we have with ispy but i have decided as this one is well supported and the other one is not supported at all i will keep with this one.

But if it isn't a lot of work to do, maybe think about adding the 'Times' part to a next up-dated version of yours.

[digitalpoint]

Well the time thing wouldn't be terribly hard to add, but I'm still not so sure how useful it would be... for an active site, they would all be happening at the same time (more or less "now")... and then for a non-active forum, the times would be so far apart it makes the forum seem really slow (which probably isn't what they want). I just don't really see an upside to it...

[New Joe]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

Well the time thing wouldn't be terribly hard to add, but I'm still not so sure how useful it would be... for an active site, they would all be happening at the same time (more or less "now")... and then for a non-active forum, the times would be so far apart it makes the forum seem really slow (which probably isn't what they want). I just don't really see an upside to it...

Maybe just something I am use to with the ispy one.

If it really isn't terribly hard to add, why not just add it (for me ) and make it the same as the other features you have with your mod, so they can be turned off if someone didn't want the times showing in the Plug in manager.

Thanks for getting back to me and listening so fast digitalpoint:up:

[digitalpoint]

Well the reason I've been so reluctant to add a preference for it is I'm also an efficiency freak and like to shave nanoseconds off whatever I can... So for a setting that I don't (personally) see much use for, this is the math...

It would take roughly 200 bytes of PHP memory to *have* the setting, so that's just an extra 200 byts of memory that need to be allocated for each and every request. Let's say that allocating that added 1/500,000th of a second to the HTTP request (no idea what it would be, just throwing a number out there). For my site, we have approx 2,500 HTTP requests per second going through the vBulletin init process (we do things with it other than just the forum obviously). So 216M requests/day pulling data from the datastore and dumping it into memory. To the grand scheme of things, we just added a net effect of 432 seconds of unnecessary wait time to HTTP requests for the day just by *having* the setting.

In addition, it would add about 15 bytes to the datastore (which in our case is memcached... so it's going through the network to whatever web server is serving the request). Which is a net effect of 3GB of local network traffic each day for us.

[RK KINGKONG]

installed and working great 4.1.1 thank you sir for the effort n time .

[AusPhotography]

This is our hacked version.
We changed it to add more info, have a control of which User Group can use it and to hook into our Photo competition system

We also changed the javascript to better handle network time outs.

You can have our changes if you wish.

Edit: Attachment removed - new post for new version

[New Joe]

Originally Posted by snoopytas

This is our hacked version.
We changed it to add more info, have a control of which User Group can use it and to hook into our Photo competition system

We also changed the javascript to better handle network time outs.

You can have our changes if you wish.

Saw this and thought I'd give a try.
It didn't work, no up dates.
Nice with the extra usergroup permissions but I'll stick to digital's supported Mod.

[AusPhotography]

Originally Posted by New Joe

Saw this and thought I'd give a try.
It didn't work, no up dates.
Nice with the extra usergroup permissions but I'll stick to digital's supported Mod.

Sorry about that.
New version attached (it had a dependency on our Photo Comp system I've made optional)


Hopefully Digital point could incorporate my changes into his product ((c) permission granted)

Updated version attached.