XF 1.5 Excluding images from external rss feeds

[Sperber]

As RSS feeds are copyright protected material, many external RSS feeds can cause major legal problems. Is there an option (or at least workaround) to exclude the import of images?

A professional photographer sent us an invoice for a picture that came with a RSS feed and that we hadn´t noticed until then. Our lawyer told us that it would be wise to pay him, as his rights have been violated by us. Even that this happend unintentionally.

 

[Chris D]

There isn't any specific solutions that would automatically avoid this particular situation.

However, for each feed you do have the option to manually approve the posts before they are made visible. Although this requires manual intervention, it does allow you to either delete or edit the content which would allow you to avoid such situations in the future.

 

[Sperber]

There isn't any specific solutions that would automatically avoid this particular situation.

However, for each feed you do have the option to manually approve the posts before they are made visible. Although this requires manual intervention, it does allow you to either delete or edit the content which would allow you to avoid such situations in the future.

With the amount of feeds we are fetching as continious documentation this ain´t doable regarding manpower and amount of posts. In vBulletin we had that option. Dunno wether by a addon or built-in. Is there anything we could put a <xen:comment> around? I haven´t even found, where the rss feed is configuered in the templates. As it´s an integral part of our site, we wouldn´t even back off to alter hardcoded files. We would only need to know where and what and would appreciate those hints

 

[Chris D]

There is no template.

We convert the feed's HTML to BB code and that becomes the post content.

There are potentially a few ways to achieve this with code changes, simplest and most direct of them being the XenForo_Model_Feed::prepareFeedEntry() method which receives an entry (as an array) from the RSS feed which includes the feed entry's HTML, general data taken from the feed itself, and the feed record as saved in the XF database (including the feed ID and URL etc). This method returns the entry that is passed into it with an additional 'message' key. This is what contains the BB code which is displayed in the post. I would recommend developing an add-on that extends that method and either modifies the feed entry's HTML before it is processed, or modifies the feed's BB code after it has been processed.

 

[Sperber]

Thanks Chris, guess we´ll have to go the addon-way.

As this could be easily a bad trap for webmasters I would appreciate to have an option to strip out images from rss posts included in a next xf release. Our invoice for one single picture is 600 EUR excluding his lawyer we have to pay also with another 280. Those unexpected costs can easily break the neck of smaller or niches websites and this - the copyright infringement with images in rss-feeds (text excerpts are always allowed)- is something that can be easily overseen and then coming right back at you like a homing missile on steroids.