Escape Artists
Escape Pod => About Escape Pod => Topic started by: Hilary Moon Murphy on December 02, 2013, 03:27:36 PM
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Can the wonderful mods put one up so we can discuss it?
Thanks!
Hmm
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Yeah, sorry - the episode came in on Sunday - when I was mostly away from my computer, and today I had a long series of meetings with very little time between. Working on getting it up now.
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Not that I have anything against forum moderators, but why is this still a human's job? (The creating new threads for episodes, we obviously need our friendly neighborhood moderators for the serious business).
All you need is a bot to periodically check the 3 feeds, and when a new episode drops to create a new thread in the appropriate forum with the appropriate content.
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I'd love to have a bot that does that. I also have no idea how to create one. So unless someone volunteers to do so, it'll be manual thread creation for a while still...
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not very familiar with it, but what about IFTTT (https://ifttt.com/wtf)? It sounds like the type of thing it would be ideal for. It may have to be a two step thing, IFTTT checks the feeds and then tells another program to make the thread posts. Lifehacker is always going on about how wonderful it is. I have very little need for automation in my daily routine but...
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I really wish I had the time to dedicate to this, because it looks like a fascinating project and an excellent way to learn PHP. (I always learn new things better by doing a project)
I was sorta hoping that someone had a bot lying around.
I will keep this on the back burner and when I have the time will look into it.
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I really wish I had the time to dedicate to this, because it looks like a fascinating project and an excellent way to learn PHP. (I always learn new things better by doing a project)
I was sorta hoping that someone had a bot lying around.
I will keep this on the back burner and when I have the time will look into it.
it has been marked as archived so is not being updated anymore, but will this work?
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=624 (http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=624)
I know nothing about SMF or php so no idea if it will work for you or not, was just a bit of googlefu.
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One of the problems of a bot is that the code for the RSS feed is different than the forum code. For instance, on the pseudopod site, the code for bold is <strong> whereas for the forums it is [b ]. so there would be a lot of formatting errors. Also, I'm not so sure as to how to implement a bot, nor if the one behind that link would translate the code from the site to forum code properly.
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One of the problems of a bot is that the code for the RSS feed is different than the forum code. For instance, on the pseudopod site, the code for bold is <strong> whereas for the forums it is [b ]. so there would be a lot of formatting errors.
That problem can easily be solved using, wait for it, regular expressions (https://xkcd.com/208/).
By "bot" I really mean a clever script (or perhaps 3) that sits on the EA server and does stuff.
Like, it can react to a new post on the blog, check to see if there is an mp3 file linked in it, then assume that that's a new episode and create a new thread on the forum. The formatting and parsing stuff is the easy part.
The problem is that the only scripting language I know well enough to do this in is bash scripting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29) and that is totally wrong for this sort of job.
Php might work, but I don't really know php. :\
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When I have a bit of free time (over the holidays, probably), I'll experiment with the forum mod that Lowky linked to and see if it can be used for our purposes. But generally, posting a new episode thread takes less than 5 minutes of my time, and I'm normally able to do it pretty quickly after the episode is up (the fact that this thread even exists demonstrates that late threads are a pretty rare exception rather than the norm). So I don't think it's a super high priority, though if it works well enough to make things really automatic that will be nice.
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A good sysadmin makes sure that (s)he has to do nothing. Everything is automated.
I worked in IT for a couple of years, and I really like that mentality. So when I see a problem like this I'm all "Oh, this can be solved using automation".
I agree that it's not pressing, but wouldn't it be nice?
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Honestly, if I could improve the spam bot deletion process and make it more automatic without increasing the rate of false positives, that would be my priority. Killing spambots both takes considerably more of my time and is less enjoyable than episode thread creation (except on the rare occasions that I'm so frustrated at something that deleting anything feels good).