MyAptera.com: Willing to program an autochecker

[KarenRei]

I was thinking about it, and I'm willing to write a little bot this weekend that watches for changes on myaptera.com (say, every 10 minutes or so), and if it finds any, posts a new thread on the forum alerting people of what it found. However, if I'm going to do that, it's going to need to be debugged, which means that it will be making some threads during the debugging process (at least one, so I know that it works). Unfortunately, I have no ability to delete new threads made by the bot (I.e., by my account).

1) Are people interested in such a bot?
2) Would it be acceptable for debugging threads to just sit around waiting for a mod to clean them up?
3) If not, could I somehow be given permission to delete my own new threads?

[butter]

Well, I'm definitely interested in this bot. But I'm not admin.

[garygid]

How about one watching Aptera.com also?

I think every 6-12 hours or so would be sufficient, so that
when they do make changes, you detect "a change" and
then give them a chance to complete a series of changes
before you report the links to pages with changed information.

Every 10 minutes ... might be "overkill". :)

To get around the not-deleting threads:
1. Manually create one thread "Karen Testing"
2. Program your "bot" to post messages to that thread,
and you can test all that you want.

When debugged, manually make a "MyAptera Alerts" thread
and an "Aptera.com Alerts" thread ... and have the Bot(s) post there.
Anytime the thread is updated with a new message,
it will automatically pop to the top of the list.

This way, you can do testing without bothering anybody.
Just an Idea ... Gary

[Matthijs]

I will make sure the treads are well looked after if you make them! Maybe we can make it sticky treads as well. If you need anything else just pm it or post in this tread. :)

[KarenRei]

Okay -- I'll probably write it this evening. :) I'll have it recursively look for any changes, excluding trivial changes that happen automatically (for example, aptera.com rotates its front-page picture, while myaptera.com changes what ads are posted). If it finds none, it won't post. If it finds some, it'll post them, the next time it looks at the given site, it won't find any changes from the last version it just saw, so there will be none to report :)

[gg222]

I like the idea. I've been using http://www.changedetection.com/ , but it only checks once per day.