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This is something I originally made about 4 years ago.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

Originally Posted by snoopytas

Sorry about that.
New version attached (it had a dependency on our Photo Comp system I've made optional)


Hopefully Digital point could incorporate my changes into his product ((c) permission granted)

Updated version attached.

Yes that worked.
Have the times showing and can set user group permissions.
Thanks.

[HondaATC]

Please excuse the technically challenged (Myself, ) asking this question, but what would I need to do to run this inside a widget on the CMS?


edit: Could this be done a "quick and dirty" way with the spy feed on a blank page (No heading or other templates), and then iframe it in a widget? I think it can which is what I'm trying to figure out how to do now...

[digitalpoint]

It's not possible currently to run it inside a widget (unless you change it of course).

[Alfa1]

I was just looking for a way to put ispy into a vbadvanced block.

Do you have any tips on how to accomplish this?

[OldSchoolDSL]

Confirmed to work with jQuery 1.5.0

To apply update, search in template (theme / style) for SPY

Simply change the version number:

PHP Code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.0/jquery.min.js"></script> 


I think the original was 1.4.4, so I guest changed it as seen above to 1.5.0

[Da-Vinci]

Has anybody seen an increase in server load with this? I personally can't see it but my host is blaming this for high server loads, just need some opinions please.

[digitalpoint]

You would need an insane amount of people actively looking at it at once... It's VERY low resource... so would be talking thousands of people would need to be looking at it at once on a crappiest shared setup for it to be an issue.

[Da-Vinci]

Thanks I thought as much, just needed some clarification.

[NovoCiv]

This product produces a vulnerability in my Hide Hack that I'd like to patch. I want to put this code in a hook, but I don't know which hook would apply to the spy.php page. Any ideas?

global $vbphrase, $db;
$post_text = $db->query_first("SELECT pagetext FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "post WHERE postid = $post[postid] ORDER BY dateline ASC");
$post_hide['pagetext'] = preg_replace('/\\[hide\\](.*)\\[\/hide\\]/siU', 'Your Message Goes Here', $post_text[pagetext]);
$post['pagetext'] = nl2br(vbchop($post_hide['pagetext'], 200));

[digitalpoint]

There are no spy specific hooks, but all the normal ones that run globally on all pages should be run. If you enable debug mode on your setup, it should tell you exactly what hooks are being run for any page you are on.