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.

[KW802]

Originally Posted by Geographic2

... An idea for future implementation would be to search the RSS feeds for keywords... each feed having it's own set of keywords or a global keyword much like . ....

See my earlier posts..... :lick: I ended up doing mine with some hard-coded logic in the articlebot.php file itself.

[RetroDreams]

Anyone get the ESPN feeds to run regularly? I get them to run once then they fail from then on out.

[sully02]

Originally Posted by RetroDreams

Anyone get the ESPN feeds to run regularly? I get them to run once then they fail from then on out.

I can't get them to work either. I got one ESPN feed, then they went to crap for me.

[we_are_borg]

I have a strange problem i have several feeds 18 in total. But 2 of them will not post i have tryed all sort of things to make it work but to no avail. The other 16 works fine there updating and all. I run php 4.3.8. Also i get a blank page when i run articlebot.php

[alexisbellido]

Originally Posted by Velocd

I've been meaning to make an update fixing the bugs discussed so far, but just haven't had the time.

Probably at the weekend I will do so.

Do the trimming of the thread title mentioned here, and hopefully that erases some duplicate threads that are only off by whitespace.

This hack checks for threads of the same title that already exist, and if they do, it wont post them again. Unless there is a bug.

Hi everybody, I've been using ArticleBot several weeks with no problem.

Today I noticed I am getting duplicate threads, I have not changed anything in my Wordpress blog , vBulletin or ArticleBot config.

Afaik the trimming of title is already included in my ArticleBot version (1.1) to avoid duplicate threads. As I said, everything was working ok for the last weeks and the duplicated threads just started a couple of days ago.

Any idea why this started happening?

[Megareus Rex]

Why hasn't anyone answered my question yet?

[ChessMess]

Running the SQL install script on PHP5 produces these errors due to the code not containing proper initialization of variables:

Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #2 is not an array in C:\xampp\xampplite\htdocs\forum\includes\init.php on line 517

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in C:\xampp\xampplite\htdocs\forum\includes\sessions. php on line 270

Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #2 is not an array in C:\xampp\xampplite\htdocs\forum\includes\functions .php on line 3616

Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array in C:\xampp\xampplite\htdocs\forum\includes\functions .php on line 3616

Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #2 is not an array in C:\xampp\xampplite\htdocs\forum\includes\functions .php on line 3616

At least that is what I gathered from the PHP 5 Released thread and the results of me trying to run this on a PHP 5 server. Just a FYI for those using XAMPP setup.

[we_are_borg]

I have some additional information about my problem.

I have 7 forums and 17 rss feeds only the first 5 forums are being filled the others are not. In those 5 forums there running 15 feeds now. If i try to add a feed to a new forum it will not run/fill the forum, if i setup a other feed in a forum that is running then it works fine.

[-Caged-]

First I want to say great job on the hack, I really appreciate the time and effort that went into this. And next, on to the bad stuff

I kept getting 'Error: File Not Found at http:/.... even though I could paste the address in my address bar and load the file up perfectly.

I took the error suppression off file_get_contents and its returning a 404 which I can't seem to figure out why. I tried manually adding 'OK' headers to the page using the header() function, but I still recieved the same message. And just to elimiate the fact that it had to do with fopen wrappers or whatnot I tried to grab an rss feed from a file on the same server, but different account and it worked perfectly.

I've screwed with this for about 4 hours now and i've tried everything that I'm aware of to try, anyone else have any idea what might be causing the problem?

Cheers -Justin

[Megareus Rex]

Originally Posted by -Caged-

First I want to say great job on the hack, I really appreciate the time and effort that went into this. And next, on to the bad stuff

I kept getting 'Error: File Not Found at http:/.... even though I could paste the address in my address bar and load the file up perfectly.

I took the error suppression off file_get_contents and its returning a 404 which I can't seem to figure out why. I tried manually adding 'OK' headers to the page using the header() function, but I still recieved the same message. And just to elimiate the fact that it had to do with fopen wrappers or whatnot I tried to grab an rss feed from a file on the same server, but different account and it worked perfectly.

I've screwed with this for about 4 hours now and i've tried everything that I'm aware of to try, anyone else have any idea what might be causing the problem?

Cheers -Justin

Thats the exact problem i have...