Topic: Web-wide Bitcointip Bot (Read 897 times)

Just create a chrome and firefox plugin. Solved.

A bot needs the following:

One time:
A statement from a user account that he/she controls a certain payout address, ideally signed with the private key of this address. The bot looks for these specially formatted messages and either replies (more difficult) or just displays it on it's status page (e.g. "Bitcointalk.org: Account "Sukrim", Address "1Bitcoinaddress123")

At tipping time:
Just post/publish a short line as a comment (in the future maybe via PM?) similar to reddit right now with the tipping amount. The bot then would either just conform it on its status page or even write a comment on the page itself (more difficult, so maybe in the future).
This might be viewed as spam in some communities though, so having a button + API that can be embedded into an existing page via greasemonkey etc. might be an alternative.
The bot then would keep an open ledger (maybe even with the program "ledger"!), so also others can see which posts have created how many tips.

Having it just crawl the internet for magic strings might be a bit too much though, maybe something where you can sign up your website/forum to be bitcointip enabled should be possible though. Still I'm not sure how this actually would work out, especially since it will be probably necessary to only look at posts after a certain time and date - if the site cannot provide this, crawling might take some serious time and effort, depending on the forum. Also providing this as an external service might get you banned for crawling/botting quickly. If you on the other hand have people manually enter every single post or comment they make in a list for potential tips, this will be far too much effort for them.

I think a web wide bitcoin tipping bot would be amazing.  And I think I have some ideas on how it could be accomplished...

Basic Requirements:
1) Has to know what pages people have tipped on.
2) Has to be able to create posts on said pages.
3) Has to be able to authenticate individuals (so one person cannot withdraw another person's Bitcoins).

How can we do this?
1) User submits URL of page to tipping bot after writing up a tip.  The tipping bot forever stores that page and checks it in the future for more tips at regular intervals.
2) This is the biggest problem, and might require a lot of manual work for each new page submitted.  I am thinking that the bot could store credentials for each domain managed, then attempt to use said credentials to log in whenever a new URL is submitted under that domain.  If it fails, then whoever is managing the bot would be notified.
3) Authentication is another big challenge.  Many login systems are unique in how they will act, and whether they will let users send private messages to each other.  So, different rules will have to be created with each system.  Disqus, for example, allows users to "leave a message" on another user's profile, but those are likely public.  Still, allowing users to withdraw money publicly would still be better than nothing.

Bottom line is, it could most definitely work, but would require a lot of setup for each comments system that is used.  It is good that news sites are trending towards using already-standardized platforms (like Disqus and OpenID), and may be incredibly easy to implement because of that.  But there are more websites than just news site that people might want to tip on.  Forums, for example, would be a big one.  The user could certainly sign the bot up for numerous forums as needed, but the forum admin could always ban the bot and cause tipping to come to a standstill there.

Thoughts?