Creating a Channel Crawler Bot

[Ecelectic]

Im just curious as me and my friends may attempt this but with your current knowledge would it be possible to make a bot that crawls bnets channels somewhat like the googlebot crawls the web?

[UserLoser.]

Googlebot? Try being more specific

[Tazo]

huh? u mean channel to channel retrieving user info or just chan 2 chan

[Ecelectic]

Finding all the channels and indexing them, say putting them onto a website as a list... like bnet does with wc3 users..and keeping them current and updated. Maybe going as far stating how many users are in each channel @ the time it went there.

Googlebot - is google.com's bot that moves from website to website gathering information.

[effect]

Receiving a complete private channel list is impossible.

[Banana fanna fo fanna]

But there are no links to crawl...

[MrRaza]

Receiving a complete private channel list is impossible.

There is another way of going throught a list of channels someone has made.

[effect]

uh elaborate , receiving a complete server side channel list is AFAIK impossible.

[Lord-Vegito]

if ur really desperate theres a really slow and boring way of doing it...

Finding all the channels and indexing them

have ur bot do a /whois command on a bunch of possible channels listed in some dictionary

so...

have ur bot do a "/who a" and if it gets a msg like "That channel does not exist." then dont do anything, if it gets a different msg then the channel exists, and u can save it to a text file or something. after that continue thru the alphabet, once getting to "/who z" start over and go 2 digits "/who aa" "/who ab" and so on. repeat the process till ur done "/who zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" somewhere along there u would have found actual channels. dont forget to add numbers and stuff in the rotation and do it over again for op and clan channels. having multiple bots doing multiple parts of the dictionary would speed things up a bit but not much.

(like i said, slow and boring, not to mention not worth the effort)

Maybe going as far stating how many users are in each channel @ the time it went there.

if the channel exists (and ur not banned) u can count the users in the channel from the list bnet sends u from the /who command.




this is a really disgusting way of doing it if u ask me but right now its the only method i can think of.

[Eli_1]

In other words a brute force approach on finding all possible channels. Doing it this way could take days, and would most def. be inaccurate by the time it finished... a better, yet still slow way, would be to have a pre-defined list of known channels that usually always have people in them...

[Spht]

Not sure what the purpose of this is, but you could roam public Warcraft III channels and make note of every Warcraft III user that's in a clan, that would get you list of clan channels. As you get more clan channels, you would also add those to the list of channels to roam to find more people in clans. In an hour you'd probably collect over 100 channels.

[o.OV]

But there are no links to crawl...

profile a user and a extract channels?
most clan members mention their home channel
in their profile..
whether it be "Op " or "Clan "
That would be the closest thing to a link.
And/Or you could setup so
the bot "analyses" the username
and generates a list of possible channels
based on the username's tag if any.. 2 to 3 letter tags.
I don't know if it will work well..
but it is an option to consider

[Adron]

In other words a brute force approach on finding all possible channels. Doing it this way could take days, and would most def. be inaccurate by the time it finished... a better, yet still slow way, would be to have a pre-defined list of known channels that usually always have people in them...

It wouldn't take days. Doing it this way would take years and eons. It seems probable that you wouldn't be done before the sun runs out.

[Kp]

One idea I've seen for a follower bot (i.e. automatically trails you as you roam, but does not crawl independently) is based off the fact that mutual friends always know where each other are.  So make the bot a mutual friend, have it "/f l" whenever you leave channel, and then use the resulting friendslist to track you down.  Not exactly a channel crawler, but it is an automated way of locating channels not known in advance.

[FuzZ]

I would just have a database of channels. Users could submit via the web or command. Although you would either have to sort through these using what's real/what's not, or if the bot joins the channel and it's empty, it deletes that channel and goes about it's business.

:edit: grammar/punctuation.