The RSS Feed Editor will then load, presenting you with a detailed form to complete in order to instruct vBulletin how to treat the RSS feed to which you are pointing it.
- Reset Last Checked Time
This control is related to the Check Feed Every... control (see below) and allows you to have vBulletin check the feed the next time the robot checks any feeds, instead of waiting for the next scheduled time. - Feed is Enabled
If this control is set to 'No', the feed will be ignored. The enabled switch is an easy way to temporarily disable a feed without actually deleting the record from the database. - Title
Enter a title for your feed here. This will be used soley for identification purposes within the Admin Control Panel. - URL of Feed
This is the most important control on the page. Enter the full URL to the feed here, including the port number if it is non-standard.
A few examples:- https://www.example.com/feed.rss
- https://www.example.com/secure_feed.xml
- https://www.example.com:8080/another_feed.rdf
- Check Feed Every...
Use this control to specify how frequently vBulletin should query the feed specified to check for new items.Warning:Bear in mind that checking a feed too frequently could get your server blacklisted by the site hosting the feed. - Maximum Items to Fetch
Some feeds may contain many items. To prevent your forum being flooded with messages, specify a number here to limit the messages posted from the feed to the first few items. - Search Items for Words
When a feed is checked you may optionally have vBulletin search each item for key words and only post the item if one or more of those key words is found. Enter any number of words into the text box, separating each word with a space or new line.
By ticking and unticking the Search Titles Only control you may specify whether the system should search the title feed only, or both the title feed and the description field from each item in the feed. - User Name
Enter the name of the user who to whom items posted from this feed will be attributed. Usually this would be an administrator, or a special user created soley as the poster of RSS items. - Forum
Select a forum into which messages posted from the feed will be placed. Ensure that the forum you choose can accept posts! - Allow Smilies
If any smilie codes are found in the RSS items to be posted, having this option set to 'Yes' will convert those smilie codes into their corresponding smilie images. - Display Signature
Set this option to 'Yes' if you would like items posted by the RSS feed robot to include the signature of the user to whom they are attributed (see User Name above). - Convert HTML to BB Code
Some RSS feeds contain HTML formatting. If you would like vBulletin to attempt to convert HTML into BB Code, set this option to 'Yes'.Note:Note that the later setting 'Allow HTML in Announcements' will be ignored if this option is enabled.
Information from RSS feeds is in an XML format, with each piece of information enclosed within tags.
For example: <title>Name of Item</title>.
These nodes of information can be included in the templates using the simple format {rss:node} where 'node' is the name of the tag whose contents you want to insert.
Here is an example of a template that will include the item title, description and link:
[b]{rss:title}[/b] {rss:description} [url={rss:link}]More...[/url]
The vBulletin RSS Feed posting robot has the ability to post RSS items either as threads or as announcements, with different options for each posting type. The options for each type are described in the following pages.