firstpostrobot's Journal: Should it be open-sourced?

I'm facing a difficult choice! Do I release the source for the First Post Robot?

Pros:
* I'll learn what I could do better.
* Others will learn from my efforts and improve their legitimate coding skills.

Cons:
* I'll learn how lame my code is.
* Others will learn from my efforts and improve their illegitimate haXor skillz.

What do you think?

I'll let y'all in one one deep secret: the First Post Robot is a Visual Basic application. And I'm not even using the wininet.dll low-level calls: I'm using the drop-in Microsoft Internet Control. Is this lame so far, or what?

Update (12/11/02)
In the comments, MinnKotaMarine asked if it's an actual VB app, or a VBS script. I can't reply to the post (due to bad posting from this IP, wonder who did that?), so here's some info.

It's an actual VB application, mostly because that's what I'm most familiar with. Although reading the VBS scripts of virii like the LoveLetter worm has been very interesting! (Our office got so many copies that we were shut down, and I had nothing better to do than reverse-engineer the cause of our troubles.)

I started out using the MSHTML HTMLDocument object without a WebBrowser control, building on an HTML Parser example I found on the 'net. This worked fine, except that it looked like the only way I could submit a POST (as opposed to a simple GET) was with some C-style API calls that would be difficult to make from Visual Basic.

So I dropped in the WebBrowser control, and somewhat by accident (since I never installed the help files), discovered that I could simply click the button!

If elemChild.getAttribute("type") = "submit" Then
      ' We only want the "Reply" option
      If LCase$(elemChild.getAttribute("value")) = "reply" Then
            ' Push the reply button!
            SetStatus "Pusing the Reply button!", False 'not summary

            elemChild.Click

This may have been possible with the HTMLDocument object as well, but by this point I had discovered that having a WebBrowser control on my form made it a lot easier to figure out what was going on with Slashdot's responses. I finally threw out the HTMLDocument object entirely, though I still use the MSHTML.HTMLBaseElement class to traverse the links and forms collections of the WebBrowser.

Lameness litmus

[Rick the Red]

Is this lame so far, or what?

Not if it works.

yay VB!

[Minn_Kota_Marine]

I like seeing creative solutions like this. Do you use the XMLHTTP object? Or just pass in keystrokes and stuff like that? I'd like to see the code for educational purposes, by itself. I used to have an ASP page that used the XMLHTTP object to grab images and stuff like that for a camgirl script that I used to run. Did you make an actual VB App, or just a VBS?

source

[elite lamer]

Please open-source your code! Or at least release it compiled. Once open-sourced it could quickly and easily be ported to other OSes (definitely an issue with the /. crowd). Also, perhaps it could be tweaked so that the output does not allow a link to goatse whatsoever; then many people could use it, increasing the number of FP's that do not link to goatse.

I see that as a good thing..