Miscellaneous Hacks - Kindle Daily Deal Grabber by BOP5

Brought to you by BirdOPrey5 / Qapla.com

Version 2.1.4

Compatible with VB 3.7.x, VB 3.8.x, and VB 4.x.x.

Now compatible with Amazon.com, Amazon.uk and Amazon.de!

Every day Amazon has "daily deal" on one or more Amazon Kindle ebooks. This deal will usually reduce the price of an ebook to only $0.99 to $1.99, which is a signficant savings off the regular price.

Recently they started including a daily deal for kids or teens as well.

Amazon allows you to sign up for an email notice of the deal but they are notoriously unreliable. Amazon does NOT offer an official RSS feed of the daily deal either.

This mod will grab the info of each daily deal straight from Amazon and post it to your forum as either a new thread or a new post in an existing thread.

VB4 Demo: Kindle Daily Deal at Qapla.com Forum
VB3 Demo: Kindle Daily Deal at Joe's Ultimate Off Topic

You can completely customize how the post will read using an easy replacement system above.

This mod relies on Amazon providing consistent pages and data. In my testing it works the vast majority of the time. However there is no guarantee it will work all the time on every daily deal. I have done my best to always at least provide a link to the deal even if other info is unavailable but I can't guarantee it will always work.

This mod relies on a scheduled task to run daily. Amazon usually posts the deal by 12 AM Pacific Time. You may need to go to Admin CP -> Scheduled Tasks -> Scheduled Tasks Manager to set a more appropriate time for this task to run on your forum. (Sometimes they are late in posting the deal though so I suggest waiting until at least 2AM Pacific Time to run it. )


Affiliate ID: This mod provides the site Admin the option for providing their own Amazon affiliate ID. If no affiliate ID is provided, my affiliate ID will be used.

If you have viglinks or skimlinks installed on your forum be sure you have the option to overwrite amazon affiliate ids turned on- both companies offer this option.

If upgrading from a 1.x version it is strongly recommended you uninstall the old version first. If you do not you will need to manually edit the Post Content settings to the new value.

Please Mark as Installed if you use this.
Donations always appreciated.

[BirdOPrey5]

Originally Posted by Shogo

Did you published this "rss bot" ?

vBulletin has RSS Importing built in. In the Admin CP -> RSS Feeds... Just find an RSS feed for those sites and you can setup vBulletin to import from them.

Originally Posted by imported_stefan

I suggest:

Working Example: http://forum.adeba.de/sparen-gratis-...ebote-rabatte/

Thanks a lot for your work. If its works I will be glad to donate or buy something from you.

Thanks... Donations are always appreciated and can be made by the "Support Developer" link in the top post.

Originally Posted by imported_stefan

DEALPRICE ist the ammount which you savetoday and not the product price by the way.

Whoops, you are correct. Will issue an update shortly.

[BirdOPrey5]

Updated to version 2.1.1.

Fixes bug where German mode pulls in the wrong price for {DEALPRICE}.

[synseal]

Excellent as always - working example http://www.techkings.org/ebooks/

I set it to make new threads each day and made a kindle bot as per your example.

Very nice thank you!.

[Mr_Running]

Installed and testing.
I'm wondering if the forum/thread/post needs to be public?
Will it work if the forum requires to be a logged in to view? be a member? usergroups?

[BirdOPrey5]

Forum can be private, not a problem.

The only thing is the user you assign to make the post in settings needs permission to post in whatever forum you are posting it to.

[Mr_Running]

Thanks, Worked just moments ago
One thing...the title is displaying html code

[HTML]Kindle Daily Deal for 12-12-2012[B][I][URL="http://www.amazon.com ..........[/HTML]

Also, Do I need to change the User Title Maximum Characters?

[BirdOPrey5]

What do you have for your title in the settings?

The default is:

Kindle Daily Deals: {TITLE} - {DATE}

I suppose if you use a field with BBCode in it (like {SHORTDESC}) you would see BBCode.

User Title is the word below your username ("Member" on this site) so that has nothing to do with this mod.

If you mean the thread title (or post title) max length, that is up to you, it will just cut off anything beyond the max length you have set.

[Mr_Running]

This is what I have as default...

[B][SIZE=3]Kindle Daily Deal for {DATE}[/SIZE][/B]

[B][I][URL="{LINK}"]{TITLE}[/URL][/I][/B]

edit update: Sorry, this is actually part of the Title of the Post Template
By the way...What I have is one thread with a daily post.

[BirdOPrey5]

What do you have in the box Thread / Post Title in settings because that looks like where the problem is from your screen shot. Like perhaps you posted in the Template code into the title accidentally.

If you can't see the problem, uninstall the mod and re install. Don't make any changes to the post template or title settings and manually run the task.

If still problem please post a screen shot of the entire post.

[Mr_Running]

Yeah, this was in the Thread / Post Title

[B][SIZE=3]Kindle Daily Deal for {DATE}[/SIZE][/B][B][I][URL="{LINK}"]{TITLE}[/URL][/I][/B][URL="{LINK}"][img]https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/[/img][/URL][B]About:[/B] {SHORTDESC}[B]Deal Price: {DEALPRICE}[/B] (Today Only) ({DISCOUNT} Off)[B][URL="{LINK}"]View Deals Now[/URL][/B] or [URL="{ALINK}"]Browse Amazon.com[/URL].

Thread / Post Title now is this....

Kindle Daily Deals: {TITLE} - {DATE}