Integration with vBulletin - Google Alerts as posts in your forum

[optrader]

Hi,

My forum has always struggled to develope any type of community probably because its really only me to answer questions (and in my particular niche thats not nearly enough unless I market myself as the website)..

I then consider my website as my own personal 'work-in-progress-for-forever' project. I have added some neat features (I think) to my website that makes it a bit unique from others.

Recently I considered the problem of seeding a forum. I believe that one thing that people look for when they browse a forum are threads.. lots of them.. covering a variety of topics within a category (the forum).

I also discovered that Google sends out what appears to be search results with snippets of description based on recent crawls of the web. They call these google alerts. I figured it might be neat to integrate these snippets of search results (with accreditation to the _sources_) as posts into my forum.

This required me to first set up an e-mail account on my web server that could accept the alerts as text messages. I wrote a simple program with an easy to find class to open up the mail box and parse all the data in the google alert. This data was then assigned to a user on my forum with a topic and forum designation. From there, the program would insert all the necessary data into the database to simulate an actual posting by a user.

The exact data that the program inserts into the database is of course completely customizable.. at the moment.. I don't have too many bots working and they really only have 2 - 4 variations of posts across all of them (so their posts are not very creative at all.. BUT they COULD BE!)

Anyway if you want to take a look at what I have done you can head over to my website at OpForums Stock Investing and Options Trading Forums

or a specific forum that has 2 bots working together:

Stock Investing and Trading Talk - OpForums Stock Investing and Options Trading Forums

If you are interested in me generalizing this 'addition' and posting it on vbhackers.com (for some reason my ISP can no longer access vbulletin.com or vbulletin.org) please PM me or reply to this thread and I will gladly post the program with instructions on how to use it.

This is an _addition_ to vbulletin and it works independently of the main vbulletin scripts. It requires only...

-your POP3 inbox authentication info
-access to vB database
-your creativity..

You do of course also have to have google alerts set up for your POP3 mailing address. (I haven't tested the script much on many servers so..)

Thanks!

-Brad

[Nick R]

Hasn't this already been done? Auto Post Google Alerts - vBulletin.org Forum.

[optrader]

wow what a coincidence ;]

unfortunetly I can't even access your link :[, that mod is on vbulletin.org. That may be why I didn't find it.. oh well hehe that mod is probably better than mine anyway.