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

[hypedave]

hey cool thasnk, I figured it out like, im gonna write a visual basic app for this, if you are interested in let me know

[hypedave]

okay two more things

How do I make it so that when it post it doesnt post icons ?
How do i make it so that when it post it does recieve a post count

also how can I get it to reply back to someone elses thread ?

[Sheldon Rampton]

I'm trying to use this code as the basis for a PHP program that will automatically post items from my weblog as new threads in a vBulletin forum, but I'm having a problem. When I try to test this by calling my PHP program from my web browser, I get a message that says "Please Log in: You are either not a valid administrator or have not logged in." After I go ahead and log in, the PHP program runs as expected, but I want this to run automatically, without requiring manual intervention.

Here's the URL that I've been using for my test program:
http://www.prwatch.org/forum/admin/post2forum.php

If I get this message when I try to execute the program from my web browser, won't the login requirement also block it from executing properly as a cron job?

[amykhar]

Sheldon, I didn't put mine in admin. However, I believe you can simply pass the username and password in as variables. Not sure on that one though, but couldn't hurt to try.

Amy

[amykhar]

Originally posted by hypedave
okay two more things

How do I make it so that when it post it doesnt post icons ?

I had some code from another hack that did this, but at the time it crashed and I didn't want to waste my time debugging it.

[/quote]
How do i make it so that when it post it does recieve a post count

also how can I get it to reply back to someone elses thread ?

[dstruct2k]

[QUOTE]01-09-02 at 09:59 AM hypedave said this in Post #16
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,