Many boards have threads that must be posted on a schedule.

For example some freebies boards have a thread about what was in the mail on a given day. Site sharing boards might have a thread for each date. I have a forum for members to post reviews that they write at Epinions each day.

Originally, my moderators started the thread in our Just In forum every day. Then, our robot moderators - Justin and Justine were born.

I run this using a cron script shortly after midnight each day. It's been working for a few months now.

Here's what you need to do.
1. Create an account for your robot moderator - or moderators. My version allows you to have two of them. Which one posts on any given day is calculated randomly based on the date.

2. I gave mine fun sig lines and profile pix. Babe of the day type sites can have fun with this. My board offers one hottie for each gender. :D Give your robots a personality. For fun, sometimes I log in as one of them and play with the membership.

3. I have included a standalone script that you will need to modify to suit your needs. It should be pretty easy for you to do. It is attached here as robomod.txt give it any name you desire with a .php extension and upload it to your forum directory.

4. Test it to make sure it does what you think it will do by running the script.

5. Create a cron job to run the script. I use lynx to run mine. IMPORTANT cron needs the FULL PATH to lynx!

My cron looks something like this:

0 0 * * * /usr/bin/lynx -dump http://www.eaforums.com/robotmod.php

I am NOT a cron expert. I simply filled out what I needed in my cpanel. Check the cron man pages or your nearest neighborhood Unix guru for cron help :)

Demo: Justine

Justin

Amy

I will install it later tonight..but it looks so fun to play with nice work, thanks

sounds intresting, but i am a little confused to ezactly what it dose.......

It can be used to automatically post a thread using a cron script. It's great for lazy webmasters like me. ;)

Amy

Would it be possible to post an rss file using this code? For example, posting an rss file that would consist of 'Breaking News' around the world or 'Doc JavaScript's Tip of the Day Archive'. In other words, something that will change everyday (not the same text).

Sure. Instead of hardcoding the message and the subject, just make it read from a file.

Amy

and that would be done by............. :p

somebody other than me :D Sorry. I generally only work on hacks that I can use myself because my time is limited right now :(

Amy

I can't get this to work? My host tells me my cron script is correct.

Cool hack. I'll probably install this on my test board and see how it works.