Heh. I admit that I've spent about half an hour total trying to develop something of this sort. All that I have currently is a shortcut to the BBS at this URL:
http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.php?action=modifykarma;sa=smite;uid=1548
which I refresh about as often as I ping digg. Still of questionable repute, but at least it limits my vendettas to one person, and I didn't need to create any fake accounts nor attempt to dish out more negative karma than is allotted to me. I've thought about setting up some RSS feed monitor to circumvent the whole thing, but that's not nearly as fun.
While I've mostly forgotten about it, the karma of the one person at the top of my list has dropped gradually despite his sporadic presence in recent weeks. It would be kind of fun to waste a bit of time attempting to automate it, but the work required was slightly more extensive than I cared to do.
Hint: You can't use crontab and wget/lynx/mozilla because it requires login cookies. If you wanted to do it right, however, this would probably be the best place to start. I imagine if you use some script language like python and build your headers, sending a Request object through urllib.urlopen() might work.
Oh, yeah. The boy is definitely guilty. 5 months community service. And he owes us all ice cream. Mmmmm. Ice cream.
It's not difficult to make a bot. All you need is a browser that supports frames, and the meta refresh. Here ya go:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3700">
</head>
<frameset rows="0px,*">
<frame src="about:blank">
<frame src="http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.php?action=modifykarma;sa=smite;uid=XYZ">
</frameset>
</html>
Save that as an HTML page on your local computer. Change XYZ to be the UID (number, not username) of the person you want to smite, the resave the file. Open Firefox (does not work in Internet Explorer, I think). Log into your FTL BBS account with Firefox. Then open the page you saved on your computer with Firefox. Leave it sit in the background, and as long as that page is open, every hour+100 seconds it will refresh that page, which will call the FTL BBS page that smites someone. Just don't close the window, leave it open, and it will run. You can still browse FTL BBS while this is running, it doesn't effect any other windows including other Firefox ones.
This can also easily be changed to boost someone's Karma from a dummy account. So I'm not saying Zim or Bill are using a bot, but that either one could be.
Full disclosure: I have never used this script, in fact, I just wrote it here on the spot. For proof of concept only (that it's entirely possible, ney, easy to make a smiting script). Do not eat. Do not take while driving. With liberty and justice for all. Amen.
If I knew how to write script, you fuckers would know it. I've asked plenty of techie questions around here, configuring windows and that shit. Just the fact I'm running windows speaks volumes about my skill.
Just sayin'.
Wasn't trying to knock anyone. I was just saying that it doesn't take a hacker or any kind of hacks to make a browser refresh a certain page (in this case, the bitchslapping page) ever hour or so. So I was just pointing out that anyone who knows basic HTML can make a "bot" type thing that bitchslaps every hour. If what you're saying about Zim is true, this type of thing is more plausable than someone spending hours straight clicking on the smite button on the hour.
Re: gandhi2
Of course it's cheating. I never said people "should" do it.
If you want something that works from the command line, you'll need software that can handle cookies or as you said, mimic them. After that, it's just calling the smite URL with whatever UID you want, timed to once per hour. FWIW, it's not that useful to do it to more than one or two people, because you can only smite once per hour.
Hint: wget supports cookies via the "--load-cookies" directive. Since I'm bored, maybe I'll get to work on that now. You don't even have to do anything special, you can use the cookies that your current browser is using. Or if you want a really cross platform thing, you can create a cookie for wget to use by just looking at the cookie FTLBBS sets and passing it with the "--header" directive.
//edit
Done. One liner:
wget --load-cookies "full/path/to/cookies/file/for/your/browser.txt" "http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.php?action=modifykarma;sa=applaud/smite;uid=XYZ"
Important notes:
1) Your cookies file must be in a wget-recognizable format. If you use Firefox, it is. Not sure about others.
2) The URL MUST be in quotes. Otherwise the ";" thingies fuck everything up, your shell thinks it's the end of the command when in reality it's part of the URL. So quote it, or at least escape the ; characters with a slash.
3) XYZ must be changed to a UID, likewise, "applaud/smite" must be changed to one or the other.
Set it up as a cron job. If you want, you can manually set the cookies via --header. To do this, look at your cookies and set the proper CFTOKEN and CFID and FTLBBS variables. As I'm not familiar with the SMF software running this board, I'm not sure which of those values means what. I'm guessing the FTLBBS is some sort of unique hash, possibly based on your password. The others I'm not sure. CFID might be an internal ID used for each user, or possibly each session. If you can figure that stuff out, you can avoid having to use your browser's cookie file, although I'm sure that those values are unique for each user,