Originally Posted by
ImmortalPig
You wrote a script to distribute items for the event I hosted for Christmas right? On the TSA side doesn't that make things simple or even trivial?
Having a willing user host the event and keep track of tickets and simply present you with the list of prizes to send and where should make lotteries viable I think?
Yea, disgruntlement with current tools is what's led me to looking into automation of forum stuff. So now that I've gotten started into that I've been working on expanding what I've written to include additional useful functions and implementations. Unfortunately that breaking point for me came a little too little late for a Christmas lottery but I'm hoping to get something working for Easter.
So yea you're correct - now that I'm doing this stuff on my own something like that is definitely possible (and trivial) in regards to generation and sending.
Even something like:
1. Monitoring tc transaction messages received on an account and parsing a form that the sending user fills of which ticket type to buy
2. Randomly drawing winners
3. Sending prizes
Could be possible with a bit of work for a completely automated
configure, run, and forget style lottery bot.
Little bit offtopic, but down the line there's a lot I'd like to do with this sort of stuff to make lives easier for the staff (things like automatic tsa action writing for certain time frames of a user's transaction history for reversing trades for msquad guys, or a tool for easy alt detection based on logins and other factors) and tools for the rest of the community (remake of the bigbro ingame user searching tool and an irc support/faq bot are two things I'm considering). Only road block is the amount of time I have to development and testing; but it's something that I personally enjoy doing and if it'll be saving time and helping people down the line then that's a bonus. Doing a bit of bigger project I think will be a great learning experience personally too. If you want to see the little start I've made so far then it's all in
here. Once my internship's done and I'm back at uni I'll have more time to work on it which will be good. And when it's all set up better and I have a clear plan for the way ahead in mind then any help for interested parties would be greatly appreciated. ;)