Robot Moderator

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. 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

[GeorgeofCS]

You know I think this is definitely cool. A definite thing that would be good to add is to have this robotmod used for other purposes, like messaging onto reported threads, PMing users that were reported, etc.

[amykhar]

Princeton,
Does it work when you run it from your browser?

Amy

[Princeton]

Amy,
I got it to work. thank you
I don't think the rss (thing) is such a good idea. Anyway, it works perfectly. I'm just thinking of a good way to use it.

[hypedave]

is there a way to get this to work on Windows 2000 server., I heard that windows doesnt have a cron job,

[amykhar]

Before I got cron to work, I used a windows scheduler program to simply call the url from my pc each day. The downside was that I had to be connected to the Internet for that to work.

Amy

[hypedave]

hey can you give me mor detail as in how you got it work
My configuration is a Windows 2000 Server with IIS
and it is connected to the net cause its running the forum,

[amykhar]

hypedave,
I didn't mean run it on the same server as your forum. A window would have to be manually closed each day the way I did it. Maybe somebody else would know of a way for you to do it on a Windows server. Have you looked at a windows port of cron?

Amy

[hypedave]

Oh okay I wouldnt mind running it on a seperate pc I have to. Just tell me how you did it, and what app you used, im very interested in adding this to my site. I havent looked at a windows port of cron. did you mean do I know what port cron uses, I didnt understand that last question

thanks.

[hypedave]

this robot mod is so cool, I just got it to work
nice job

how do I specify my own subject instead of it using a date

[amykhar]

In the code, simply change the $subject variable to the string of your choice. If you want the subject to be dynamic, that's a bit trickier. You would need to get the dynamic information into the script.

For example, if you wanted to start a new post each day that welcomed all new users by name in the subject line, you would have to do a query to get the names of everyone who joined in the past 24 hours, and put that information into your subject string.

Comment out my line that sets the subject as the date, and right after that, put (for example) $subject = "This is an automatic post!";

Hope that splains what you needed to know.

Amy