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.

[Rob Eh]

OK, I'm even more confused now. Still getting the same error when I run articlebot/php manually. But I have it setup to run as a scheduled task from with in vB itself, and it appears to be working.

So if everything seems to be working, so everything is fine with me!

Thanks for your help.

[Velocd]

The comments are part of vB's setup. They do not show up incorrectly in any other of vB's templates.

When modifying templates, it is often helpful to have this setting enabled so you can view the source of a page to determine what template(s) control it.

It's not a big problem to have this disabled, but it is very strange as to why the comments for the templates are incorrectly showing up as part of the article post itself. I'm confused by it.

Heh, I never noticied vBulletin 3 did this. This hack hasn't been filtering them out, because the code was never there!

Luckily preventing the comments from showing is as easy as providing an optional argument to the fetch_template() function.

So, in articlebot.php, replace:

PHP Code:

eval('$articlebot_post = "' . fetch_template('articlebot_post') . '";'); 


with:

PHP Code:

eval('$articlebot_post = "' . fetch_template('articlebot_post', 0, 0) . '";'); 


Zip has been updated.

error, debug, whatever: missing TABLE_PREFIX everywhere...

[DrkFusion]

Awesome hack once again. I installed this and modified it to my needs, and let me tell you it is amazing in my case. Even user activity has increased alot!

[Maikeru]

Great hack, Velocd. I think I might install it.

[Velocd]

error, debug, whatever: missing TABLE_PREFIX everywhere...

nexialys, where exactly? I've gone through the whole code, the vB tables all have TABLE_PREFIX to them. articlebot tables do not have them, because they are created without prefixes.

[Matrixgl]

Just finished integrating it to the v3Articles hack.....I think I will release it tonight.

Good job on the bot Velocd

[infiniterb]

I'm trying to set my scheduled tasks up for this cron job and I have it pointing to:

./articlebot/articlebot.php

Most of the other tasks will display the name of the job, then below it a Done message. I named this job Articles and all I get back is the Articles name, but I am not seeing a done message. This leads me to believe the job isn't running. Has anyone else gotten this to work via this method? I have a shared server and would really like to use this method over the others.

Thanks in advance.

[Rob Eh]

Mine was doing the same thing until I upgraded to the new release. It does work now.

[Rob Eh]

Is there a way to specify the time zone used in the control panel for this?

It uses the server time and not the time set by vB in the control panel.

Thanks,