Re: My multipost-detecting usenet bot (David Filmer)

usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

John Bokma wrote:

[..]

Make sure that you provide a contact email address.

That has also been done. It's my catch-all domain - I'll probably
spam-safe it like I do with usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (which is a
blackhole with an informative autoresponder)

What seems (or seemed) to work is usenet+bot@

spam harvesting bots seem to get only the bot@ :-D (The + is allowed in
email addresses).

Only post a reply if there hasn't been made one yet.

That's probably a good idea (although it's not uncommon for manual
flagging to be done subsequent to other replies). Making such a
change, however, would require some significant changes to the flow of
the program...

A programming challenge :-D

Also, some people who multipost understand the issue, and cancel the
wrong post. Cancels always run after the facts. What you really want
to avoid is having your bot reply to a message that has been canceled
a few seconds earlier.

I agree that would be an undesirable situation (though generally
unlikely, IMHO), but I'm not sure how to avoid it. Even posting
manually, I believe it's possible something like this could happen.

Yes. I am sure that I have replied to canceled messages more then once
in the past years.

I'm pretty sure I've replied (manually) to posts that got pulled out
from under my feet, and only my reply remained (one such post, if I
recall, was in German, but I answered it anyway only to find the
original was gone - probably in favor of a .de group). I don't know
if it's possible to avoid this situation programmatically any more
than it is manually (but I'm open to ideas!)

You could check control.cancel, but it might be overkill.

--
John Bokma Freelance software developer
&
Experienced Perl programmer: http://castleamber.com/
.

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