Well…  Work has finally started progressing on one of my pet projects, the Lochac Network Event posting bot, which is planned to be an event stewards one stop shop for advertising events in Lochac.  By filling out the one web form, the event steward or bookings officer can post an event notification to not only their own local list as well as the Lochac Network forums, their formatted event notification will automatically go to local groups within their area as well as the Lochac Announce list.  The form will ensure that all of the important information is filled in before it allows the send button to be pressed hopefully helping to remind the people sending it that there is information that needs to be provided.

The part of the project I’m doing at the moment involves collecting as many Local Group mailing lists as possible, as they seem to be scattered across 3 main servers (The SCAA server, the SCANZ server and Yahoogroups).  I currently have a basic form working that allows emails to be sent as well as posts to the relevent Forum on the Lochac Network, once I have a few security measures in place and have subscribed the bots email address to the relevant groups (which gives control of recieving the Bot’s emails firmly into the hands of the List Administrators), I can start looking into automating the form so that the sender only has a few options to select in order to advertise an event, rather than the current 30 odd lists to select from.

For those IT professionals out there who may freak at a form being created to send to that many lists, you need not worry, the form prevents header insertion, and the POST information is free of email addresses as all of the email addresses are stored elsewhere.  Once I manage to work out the authentication on the forum, users wishing to utilise this form will be required to be registered on the Lochac Network forums and their connected IP details will be recorded as well as added to the bottom of any email sent to a list.  However, as I am not actually a programmer and am just working through this with the help of friends who are and the resourses of the Net, please feel free to contact me to ask to see the source code if you are worried about this connecting to your server/list.