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This is something I originally made about 4 years ago.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

[New Joe]

So a few things dp:

Will you be making any changes to this Mod?
Adding the option to choose only certain user groups to be able to use this?
Adding 'Times' on the Posts and Threads which show on the spy page?

[New Joe]

This one is the main thing I'd like to include, I have looked around in the spy.php file but don't know how to add or edit to do this:
Adding 'Times/Dates' on the Posts and Threads which show on the spy page.

I found this in the spy.php:

$output .= '<event>' .
'<id>' . $event['spyid'] . '</id>' .
'<what>' . $what[$event['action']] . '</what>' .
'<title>' . $event['title'] . '</title>' .
'<preview>' . $event['preview'] . '</preview>' .
'<who>' . iif ($event['action'] != 42, $event['username']) . '</who>' .
'<threadid>' . $event['threadid'] . '</threadid>' .
'<postid>' . $event['postid'] . '</postid>' .
'<userid>' . iif ($event['action'] != 42, $event['userid']) . '</userid>' .
'<forumid>' . $event['forumid'] . '</forumid>' .
'<forumname>' . $vbulletin->datastore->registry->forumcache[$event['forumid']]['title'] . '</forumname>' .
'</event>';
}

I tried to add time/date but as i am not a coder i really did not know what i was doing and it did not work.
Anyone could give a heads up for what code and where to add it so it will show the date and time on the spy page.
Thanks.

[digitalpoint]

Not really sure what the real value in the date/time is to be honest. If your board is busy, they would just all be streaming through with the current time and they would mostly all be the same. If your board is inactive, it would make your board appear very inactive since you could see the huge gaps in time between anything happening...

[bada_bing]

Nice will this work for vb 3.8?

[MonsterDK]

Originally Posted by bada_bing

Nice will this work for vb 3.8?

be nice if it actually worked at all for me. vb 4.x

[Reinhard]

Hi Shawn,

spy worked in 4.08, but shows thread titles with german umlauts as "unknown" and display not the first message line, if there are umlauts.

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by bada_bing

Nice will this work for vb 3.8?

Nope, it's 4.x only.

[MonsterDK]

But seems pretty limited to what it will work on.
I have a fresh install of vb 4.0.6 pl 1 as a test board. I've disabled the few mods I had on there.
and also that will not work.

I dunno what the problem is but the point of on my main board and there been other mods possibly causing a conflict can't be the case.

It's a strange one... offered to allow the Coder access to my test board but that was declined.
So it seems support it quite limited then unfortunately. Shame because I've seen other people comment on this issue as well.

[OttoBomb]

I have a 4.1 vb and it doesn't work for me either. I have a stock install and it baffles me why it isn't working, but I certainly don't think support actually means he will provide tech support for my board. Most mods work for most people, but 100% compatibility is beyond most coders. It doesn't work for me, and I can live with that.

[MonsterDK]

Originally Posted by OttoBomb

I have a 4.1 vb and it doesn't work for me either. I have a stock install and it baffles me why it isn't working, but I certainly don't think support actually means he will provide tech support for my board. Most mods work for most people, but 100% compatibility is beyond most coders. It doesn't work for me, and I can live with that.

I understand this. But if were saying that specific board installs are not working and there is nothing to cause this. Surely, it deserves a closer look?

I'd even throw a couple of quid in the pot for the coders time. How on earth do we progress with this?