Client Side Post-Bot?

[Shinkaze]

Hey all, thought I would ask the gurus if this is possible before I embark on doing this.

I own a company that provides video portals to Forum owners and currently run a vB forum myself. (forums.streetfire.net). We offer a product that allows forum owners to add a video portal to their website that runs off our servers and bandwidth.

For example
videos.streetfire.net
video.freevideoblog.com

We want to add "blogging" capability allow users to comment on videos, but think that the forums we partner with would preffer all posts and conversations to happen on their forum rather than our forum. That is if *yourname*.com signed up with us, they would point videos.*yourname*.com to our servers, so videos would be served off our system, but commenting would occur on *yourname*.com/forums (their server).

So We need to write a client side bot that sits on our server (videos.*yourname*.com) That can create a thread (on the client's forum *yourname*.com/forum). This way when someone uploads a video to our system, our system creates a new thread on the client forum (for discussion of that video). Then When a viewer comes to see the video and they see "comment on this video" they will be taken to the thread on the client server for discussion of that video.

Anyhow we see this as a way to keep the video product tightly intergrated with our client's forums and keeps discussion and user authentication on their system.

Before I have my developer try and write this, I want to see if this is even feasible and if so could someone point me in the right direction on if maybe such a bot is already built?

The Bot needs to be able to:
Create a Thread
Audit the thread

• Is it still open?
• how many comments are there

A username password account Registration would likey be done manually by the forum owner to tie our two systems together.

It needs to be client side so I don't have to ask my forum-owner clients to install code they have to support and maintain, also it needs to be client side so we can eventually extend it to ZeroMain, phpBB ASP.NET, etc (though we all agree vB is the best )


Is this possible? Are we reinventing the wheel here?
Thanks!

-Adam

[Icheb]

One of the many spam bots available on the net should be able to do this .

[Shinkaze]

One of the many spam bots available on the net should be able to do this .

1.) This is not for Spam.
2.) This is to do Cross-Domain/Server posting between my company and a Website that has signed up for our service.
3.) This is not for Spam

To be clear this is so we can keep discussion on our client's forum rather than build our own and have to do some sort of cross domain user-verification system.

Case in point.
Videos.StreetFire.net is in Chicago
forums.StreetFire.net is in Atlanta

I want a bot installed on my Chicago server that will create and monitor a thread on my Atlanta server.

When a client signs up their domain.
Videos.*forumownersite*.com will be on our server
forums.*forumownersite*.com will be at their Datacenter

My server needs to be able to make a posts on their forum to maintain cohesion between the two sites.

[Shinkaze]

ttt

[Zachery]

If you are going to bump a post give it more content than tttt


Maybe try something like sitepoint.com or use some sort of xml feed parser.

[Shinkaze]

If you are going to bump a post give it more content than tttt

Just trying to get some feedback before this post gets burried... feedback other than "don't be a Spammer".

Maybe try something like sitepoint.com or use some sort of xml feed parser.

I talked with some of the guys about that last night. we also looked at ArticleBot

I like the idea of using RSS, we're already using it to publish our video listing to yahoo. But we realized we still have a problem there.

The Client-Forum would be able to use ArticleBot or similar to start a thread about a video, but the Video system would still need some sort of response back from the Forum to let us know where to link a "comment on this video" back to.

The trick is the system needs to do a two way communication. Our server needs to know where the thread is so we can direct a video-viewer to that thread, and the Forum needs to know to open a thread for that video.

The two solutions we have are.
1.) Write a Forum-Side daemon that is "listening" for the video system to say "we have a new video" open a thread and report back to the video system where the thread is. Drawback there is 99% of the forum owners I know would be reluctant to install and manage a custom widget, and also we would have to constantly test against new versions of vB as they're released.

2.) We write a Client side (videoserver-side) Bot that logs into a forum like a user and posts a thread under whatever user name a forum owner creates. Drawback there is I need to know if this is even possible to get our server to act like a web-user and browse into and post into a forum. Also we'd have to keep tabs on the forum to make sure they don't change structure and move their video forum.

[Icheb]

I apologize for wording my post in a wrong way. However, you want to do exactly what spam bots do, that is using a program on server A and posting with it to server B, which is exactly what spam bots do.
It's possible that your clients won't have the ability to edit their MySQL users or add new ones and many hosts have access restrictions in place so that you can only access MySQL from the localhost, so a connection directly to the MySQL server would not be possible.
As strange as this may sound, you need something just like these spam bots or, worded differently, you need something with the capabilities of a spam bot.