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This is something I originally made about 4 years ago.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

[digitalpoint]

For a site that has it installed, but it's not working, can you give me the URL to the spy.php page and also check that you have something in the digitalpoint_spy table? I have a theory... but need to see one that is doing it (don't need server access, just normal public access to see the spy.php page).

[MonsterDK]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

For a site that has it installed, but it's not working, can you give me the URL to the spy.php page and also check that you have something in the digitalpoint_spy table? I have a theory... but need to see one that is doing it (don't need server access, just normal public access to see the spy.php page).

dp, as I asked you in PM, what is this digitalpoint_spy table? and where is it found?
as I can't find it and you sorta dismissed it saying nothing apart from installing the mod needs to be done.
thanks

[betts02]

Is there a way to use this in a forumblock ?

[ShadowStalker]

Doesn't work on 4.1 PL2 for me

[MonsterDK]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

For a site that has it installed, but it's not working, can you give me the URL to the spy.php page and also check that you have something in the digitalpoint_spy table? I have a theory... but need to see one that is doing it (don't need server access, just normal public access to see the spy.php page).

I will however provide you with the test site url in private (PM).

thanks

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by MonsterDK

dp, as I asked you in PM, what is this digitalpoint_spy table? and where is it found?
as I can't find it and you sorta dismissed it saying nothing apart from installing the mod needs to be done.
thanks

It should be in your forum database along with the other normal forum tables.

[digitalpoint]

The ones I've seen not working so far has the web servers returning an HTTP "406 - Not Acceptable" when the web browser requests the XML feed. This is going to be some sort of configuration issue on the server-side.

Maybe a mod_security module set in overly aggressive blocking mode.

You could try adding this to your .htaccess file to test if disabling mod_security fixes it:

SecFilterEngine Off

Either way, it's something specific to the web server that's forcing a 406 error, but only when it's getting the XML feed of new events.

[MonsterDK]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

The ones I've seen not working so far has the web servers returning an HTTP "406 - Not Acceptable" when the web browser requests the XML feed. This is going to be some sort of configuration issue on the server-side.

Maybe a mod_security module set in overly aggressive blocking mode.

You could try adding this to your .htaccess file to test if disabling mod_security fixes it:

SecFilterEngine Off

Either way, it's something specific to the web server that's forcing a 406 error, but only when it's getting the XML feed of new events.

If I try that, I get the following error when putting a .htaccess file on my forum root with that line.

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@blah.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

[digitalpoint]

You will want to check with your hosting company to see if they have mod_security enabled or something similar.

[Habsy]

Is this working on 4.1 PL2 or not?