firstpostrobot's Journal: I'm sure it's been done before!

I'm sure someone has created a First Post Robot before. But this is my attempt at the fine art of hacking Slashdot. Obviously, I have created a special account just for this purpose, and will gleefully watch its Karma drop to the floor, then dig a hole and burrow even further.

But I will make one promise: I will NEVER post a misleading goatse link. "Troll Tuesday" at Subway? Give me a fsking break! (Note: link contains misleading goatse links, beware!)

Update (11/26/02): The First Post Robot is successful! Sort of. This post was indeed a First Post, but it was entered manually after the Robot alerted its author of the condition. That led to further code and a fully operational robot. Its first attempt to post generated the following message:

Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email us...

Obviously, it is me, and it is fair. I will happily sit in the corner. The only frustration is that I can't reply to the excellent replies to this journal entry.

For the curious: my Karma is officially Bad. It will only get worse...

Update (12/04/02): A First Post success log is now in place. Check it out. Note that there are now several FirstPostRobot Slashdot logins, since users with "Terrible" Karma can only post twice a day.

Meanwhile, I've already received a request for "where to download FirstPost"... should I make it available, make it open-source, or keep it to myself so that the skr1pt k1ddi3s don't get hold of it? (Or should that read, "so that the other skr1pt k1ddi3s don't get hold of it"?)

Update (12/10/02): Since the comment period is only two weeks, please continue the discussion of whether to Open-Source FirstPost in this new Journal Entry.

I don't get it

[I Am The Owl]

Why would you build a robot to get first posts on Slashdot? Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just write a script to do it?

Re:I don't get it

[saskboy]

That is one cool joke.
Too bad it is about a very serious matter: The degredation of /.

Re:Karma Robot!

[Minn_Kota_Marine]

It actually wouldn't be that hard to get the content for the karma whore posts. Links to news.google.com are almost always guaranteed +1 Informatives

http://news.google.com/news?num=100&hl=en&q=conten t+goes+here [google.com]

Re:Karma Robot!

[thinkninja]

Excellent idea!

You could even have the karma bot grok the news.google url and use the first paragraph as post content.

Also, could easily make a SOVIET RUSSIA robot for funny mod points.

Re:Karma Robot!

[DoNotTauntHappyFunBa]

Karma Robot. Would that be anything like the Electric Monk from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency?

Re:Karma Robot!

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You know, back in the heyday of the Internet, there was a search engine called Electric Monk. It was unique at the time because it expected input to be in question form; it parsed the questions and looked for relevant matches. I remember getting some pretty magical results out of it on occasion.

It is, of course, long gone.

Re:Karma Robot!

[Tin Weasil]

Simple.

Build a robot that pulls text from whatever articles are linked to in the story, then have the robot post:

"Here's the full text from the site, in case it gets slashdotted..."

Instant "Informative" moderation.

Tell us a little bit about your robot ...

[mustangdavis]

Does it simply connect to slashdot.org's port 80 and repeatedly download the main page to see if it has something new? If it sees a new thread, it simply sends a POST to the web server with all of the user info that it would require (plus your username and pass .... obviously)?

I hope that it is a bit more advanced than that .... because if it isn't, I'll be kinda disappointed. I made a toy like that to message tons of people in a web game quite a few years ago .... and it only took me about 30 minutes to write it. Hopefully I'll learn a trick or two if ou open source this.