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This is something I originally made about 4 years ago.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

The next version will have better handling of thread titles and usernames that have strange characters in them... I would bet you had a thread come across that it choked on the title or username posting it.

[New Joe]

Not sure about the above, but it was all working fine until there were no posts for an hour, then it just stopped.

When will the next version be out?

[digitalpoint]

The 1.1.0 version I just uploaded should handle non-standard characters better. Go ahead and try it out and let me know.

[res6cue]

Originally Posted by res6cue

Ok I found a rather odd issue that hopefully can be resolved:

From time to time, nothing populates on the page for logged in users. However if you log out and check the page as a guest, it populates! I've tried a ton of things to get it to work, including disabling all other mods, to no avail. The digitalpoint_spy table has all the entries in it (as evidenced by the page populating for guests), but it just refuses to populate for logged in users from time to time. The 'Only Include Subscribed Forums' option makes no difference, either it works or it doesn't regardless.

Is there anything that could be causing this behavior? It's driving me nuts, because I really want to keep this mod around, it's extremely handy and our users love it...when it works!

Any fix for this issue? You asked me a followup question, then never replied again.

[digitalpoint]

What's the URL you have it running at?

[res6cue]

I don't currently, I uninstalled it because it wasn't doing much good not populating. I will try installing the latest release and see if it behaves better.

[kingMOB]

Latest version worked in Chrome, not in Firefox. This one works in Firefox, not in Chrome, vBulletin 4.0.8 here. Any word for a widget or forum block? =)

[digitalpoint]

What's the URL you have it installed at that it's not working with Chrome? Works fine in Chrome for me.

As far as a widget block... It just hasn't been a huge priority since we don't use the sidebar on our site, so... But one of these days... Was thinking about maybe doing something along the lines putting new events into the area at the top of our pages that currently stream new tweets (relevant to the forum someone is in).

For example: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=64 forum shows tweets related to forum software (ignore the "Did You Know..." one.

[wipedout]

any way to make this function more like on this site?

http://www.facepunch.com/fp_ticker.php and if so, how hard would implementing it be?

[OldSchoolDSL]

Installed update & working

4.1.1