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.

[Bobby S]

Originally Posted by ranger2kxlt

Ok, got my search query going good....but! it seems to pull the same info from different sources, and i have repeat posts.....is there a way to moderate the bot? so all i have to do is look at the threads and take out the dups.?

Its an extra step, but at least i don't have to find the news!

Thanks

See the cron job malarkey.

Is there any reason why you cannae set the cron as a scheduled task in the vbulletin admin panel or am I missing something really obvious?

[ranger2kxlt]

I think i got it....i had mutliple listings to post from the search engine they gave me....but it would pull the same data, just from a different source each time it updated....so i would have multiple posts stating the same thing, the only difference was the source.

But i managed a way around it.

Thanks for the help

[Sanjiyan]

Hiya I was wondering if you can help me..

I installed and then removed this hack, but now it seems that none of my users can make new threads on any sections within the forum, it just comes up with this error message:

No Thread specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the webmaster

Users have no problems with replying to current posts made.

I removed the files, and removed the relevent tables it made in the database, but something is very wrong here.

vBulletin 3.0.3
http://f7.sanjiyan.co.uk

[lazytown]

Why can't ArticleBot process the following news feed, for example. Yahoo has a GREAT tool for searching/filtering news and outputting it as RSS.. However it is useless if I can't get to work. For comparison, I've provided a yahoo feed that does work.

Doesn't Work:
http://search.news.yahoo.com/usns/yn....html?vo=happy

Works:
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/us

Both work in several Windows RSS readers.

Thanks for any help!
-Victor

[Sanjiyan]

Originally Posted by Sanjiyan

Hiya I was wondering if you can help me..

I installed and then removed this hack, but now it seems that none of my users can make new threads on any sections within the forum, it just comes up with this error message:

No Thread specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the webmaster

Users have no problems with replying to current posts made.

I removed the files, and removed the relevent tables it made in the database, but something is very wrong here.

vBulletin 3.0.3
http://f7.sanjiyan.co.uk

Sorted this problem out now, so can you please ignore this 'help' request.

[Frito]

Hello I'm installing your Hack and am stuck at step #3. I gues I'm too literal but can you elaborate?

"Create a template called articlebot_post"

where do we put this Template?

Thanks

[Frito]

Velocd here is update from a little while ago-

I made a text file and called it "articlebot_post" and put it in /path/to/forums/admincp/

Is this correct? (it doesn't say in step #3 where to put template)

Anyway after I uploaded all the files and went into admin panel I see the article bot stuff on left,however

I'm getting this error inside admin when trying to add bot-

==============================
Database error in vBulletin 3.0.3:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT userid
FROM user
WHERE userid = 0

mysql error: Table 'CreditForum.user' doesn't exist

mysql error number: 1146

Date: Friday 16th of July 2004 04:40:33 PM
Script: http://www.creditscorebooster.com/Cr...ebot_admin.php
Referer:
http://www.creditscorebooster.com/Cr...min.php?do=add

===============================================

When I log into phpmyadmin for access to database I see this error;

Error
The additional Features for working with linked Tables have been deactivated. To find out why click here.

PMA Database ... not OK[ Documentation ]
General relation features Disabled

=================================================

Do you suppose that this means I can't use your hack on my server the site is hosted on?

Can you help trouble shoot this?

Thank you
Looks like a really good hack once it gets going.

R.C

[Chris-FH]

Please help me, I'm getting this error:

Warning: main(./global.php) [function.main]: failed to create stream: No such file or directory in /xxx/html/board/articlebot/articlebot.php on line 43

Fatal error: main() [function.main]: Failed opening required './global.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php') in /xxx/html/board/articlebot/articlebot.php on line 43

@romeshomey:

What was your solution?

C.

[lazytown]

Strangely enough, if I save the RSS html file to my server and have Articlebot read it off the file (as html), it works fine.. But if it tries to get the feed directly from the feed server it doesn't work. Guess I'll have to write a cron that saves the feeds to my server!

-Victor

Originally Posted by vissa

Why can't ArticleBot process the following news feed, for example. Yahoo has a GREAT tool for searching/filtering news and outputting it as RSS.. However it is useless if I can't get to work. For comparison, I've provided a yahoo feed that does work.

Doesn't Work:
http://search.news.yahoo.com/usns/yn....html?vo=happy

Works:
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/us

Both work in several Windows RSS readers.

[lazytown]

This fixed the articlebot HTML encoding problem for me :

In the articlebot/articlebot.php change:

$article['description'] = strip_tags(htmlspecialchars($article['description']));

to

$article['description'] = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($article['description']));

HTML now doesn't need to be enabled (which is a security risk).