[Robotgroup] Meetup RSVPs - Thanks

[Bryan Bishop]

On Thursday 10 July 2008, Robert Carter wrote:
> At least part of the problem is that, as a Meetup entity, we don't  
> appear to be very active. We have a lot of lively discussion on this
>   list, but they don't get to see any of that. I've posted a couple
> of messages on the Meetup message board, one to encourage new members
> to join the email list and come to meetings, and another to promote
> the Basic Stamp II SIG. The former got four views, the latter got
> two, so that doesn't seem terribly effective. I tried doing the
> Wal-Mart greeter thing, sending messages to personally encourage new
> Meetup folks to come to meetings, but that was way too time
> consuming.

We can automate that. It's a simple perl script, or hell even a wget 
call through bash that would do a POST to the proper form with the 
right authentication keys. I should know :). I was doing something like 
this a while back on twitter for automatically following a large number 
of people at once, and there's a line for username/login. Let's see if 
I can't do this for you ..

First step is to get the right cookies.
# wget --post-file=LOGINDATA.txt --save-cookies=LOGIN.cookies 
http://meetup.com/loginform.cgi

Then we'll just post some data to the site to send a message to 
somebody.

# wget --post-file=POSTDATA.txt --load-cookies=LOGIN.cookies 
http://meetup.com/submitform.cgi

I don't actually know the names of the pages on the site. I'll have to 
go look that up. Also, I'll have to go look up the forms and the 
variables that they are using, but this is pretty effortless. Next step 
is to throw up a script to scrape off information on new members, and 
then keep track of which ones have / haven't been messaged, then just 
submit the messages on a nightly basis at midnight via a quick edit to 
crontab -e. Does anybody have some stable servers? I'd offer mine, but 
I'm clobbered nightly:
http://heybryan.org/webalizer/

:-(

Vern? You have anything stable that could afford to do 20 KB/night? Heh. 
ISP and all, so I figure ...

- Bryan
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