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.
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 and that is totally wrong for this sort of job.
Php might work, but I don't really know php. :\