now, how do I...

[suicidal pencil]

School is comming to a close, and I'm starting to become overloaded with work. Meaning that I wont have time to check the twenty or so forums I belong to.

I've decided to create a perl script that would go to each and every site, list new posts, alert me to PMs, and then write it into a .txt file.

My question is: how would I go about this? I know how I would write information to a file, but I'm inexperianced with CGI . I'm not actually sure of where to start from.

Could anyone point me in a direction?

[v0id]

It can be hard to make such script, because forums are made differently and the structure of the underlying HTML is not necessarily the same from forum to forum. I would instead concentrating on the forums providing RSS feeds. In that way you'll only have to care about a single structure.

If you don't want to make a RSS parser yourself, you can use an already existing one. You may want to look into XML::RSS and eventually XML::RSS::Parser::Lite if you want a simpler interface.

[suicidal pencil]

There are four sites that I'm worried about.

z11.invisionfree.com/conflagrationV_M_G
z14.invisionfree.com/playr_forums
The Defectors Clan • Index page
and this one.

I know that forums.defectorsclan.com uses PHP, but I'm not entirely sure about this one (I think PHP again...not sure though), and the zx.invisionfree.com/xxxxxx sites are completly unknown to me.

[Jordan]

Most forums have an RSS feed. I'm betting these 3 do and you can find information about this one here: RSS Feeds

Once you figure out the RSS feeds you can then use Perl to fetch the XML and write them to a file. Even better, iGoogle will do this for you as will Outlook and several other clients.

[suicidal pencil]

I'm making this mostly because I think it would be a wicked thing if I achieve it ...but it would also help me decide if I need to make an appearance on a particular site.

[v0id]

Originally Posted by suicidal pencil

There are four sites that I'm worried about.

Both "thedefectorsclan" and CodeCall has RSS feeds. Here they are:

http://forum.codecall.net/external.php?type=RSS2
Latest posts from “The Defectors Clan� board.

I wasn't even able to open the other sites, so I can't say whether they have or not.

[suicidal pencil]

playr.co.uk
Conflagration V M G (<- I think it's PHP <_<)

[v0id]

It seems like they don't have RSS feeds, at least I haven't found them.

[Jordan]

Couldn't find them either. I noticed the first one was Invision Power Board. They would need to install an addon to enable the RSS feed feature.

[fahlyn]

What's wrong with just using the forum's email notification features? Most sites frown on "page scraping"....which is what it sounds like you're trying to do.