limit rss description

[jahshaka]

hey,

reall going crazy trying to figure this out! i have 2 forums running vbulletin and am about to start a 3rd but cant get my feeds to work right.

on my main forum, running vb 3.5, my rss feeds are cut at about 200 characters - i didnt set this and cant figure out how and where this was done?

http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/external.php?type=rss2

on my 2nd forum, running vb 3.6, the feeds show the entire post!

http://www.vfxjobs.com/forum/external.php?type=rss2

and so people can jack all my job listings! how can i cut it back to be the same as in my first forum?

i also want to upgrade my first forum but am now concerned that the same problem will happen!

UPDATE!

ok so this is what i got back from vbulletin.com

I believe that is the difference between how RSS feeds are processed between 3.5 and 3.6. Changing this requires modifying the code.

are there any mod's for 3.6 that do just this - shorten the description in the feed?

[jahshaka]

bump???

[jahshaka]

yea bump again,

this is a serious fricking problem in vb 3.6 in that your forums content gets jacked by everyone out there with a site and a rss reader... they can scoop down text, images, etc....

its a night mare how do i fix things so they just get the first 100 words??? rss is supposed to promote my site not let people jack it!

help please!!!

[ResaleBroker]

Did anyone come up with a solution for this?

[jahshaka]

i have not been able to ... cant find a mod for this either!

[jahshaka]

still no-one?

[mccollin]

I would like to know this too... I would like to limit the feed to a few lines... not the whole article. Otherwise someone could just feed my news stories directly to their site. This is a crazy design if there is no way to limit it.

[Paul M]

There is no way to limit it without using a plugin (as we do here).

This is a simplfied version of what we do ;

Hook: external_query

unset($vbulletin->GPC['fulldesc']);
$vbulletin->options['threadpreview'] = 200;
$hook_query_fields .= ",LEFT(post.pagetext,400) AS message";

[mccollin]

Thanks for sharing that. I'm actually onto another plan now. It looks like its not that difficult to convert everything to Feedburner. I'm going to attempt to convert my stuff to that. In order to then force everyone through Feedburner, I wonder if there would be any side-effects if I changed the name of external.php to something else after I get it converted. That would assure that no one could use the old method and get full feeds.

[ResaleBroker]

Originally Posted by Paul M

There is no way to limit it without using a plugin (as we do here).

This is a simplfied version of what we do ;

Hook: external_query

unset($vbulletin->GPC['fulldesc']);
$vbulletin->options['threadpreview'] = 200;
$hook_query_fields .= ",LEFT(post.pagetext,400) AS message";

This works great. Thank You!!!