Integrating a TippingBot Into a Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

[Paleus]

We are looking into integrating tipping functionality, much like a ChangeTip bot, into the Diginomics Forum.

Because the database of a SMF is totally different from social media -- say Google+, Reddit, or Facebook, how would one go about doing this?

We had the idea to create a bot account, say 'TipBot' and have a function where everytime it is mentioned by a user in a post, and a money value is defined, it will tip this to another user.

However, this would require a whole infrastructure for tipping accounts, something we don't have but ChangeTip does.

How could one go about integrating ChangeTip into a forum community? Would ChangeTip need to create an API or is there some other way you could do it?

We are looking at collaborating with a few developers here to accomplish this project.

[ambrixa]

I'm looking for the same thing on our forum. Maybe we can ask Simplemachines to build a modification.

There are tipping platforms already, like:
https://www.reddcoin.com/reddcointalk-tip-platform-now-live/

[blue_w1nter]

There are many ways you can integrate a tip bot

1 If you are the admin of the forum (and have access to the server(s) running the forum including the database)

You could run a bot to continuously query against the database to find comments that include a certain phrase e.g. "!tip"
Once that command is found the bot could either automatically deduct from the users tip balance and send it to another balance (ready for withdrawal)
Or post a reply to that comment with an address to send for the bot to forward - sort of acting as a middle man between the two users


2 If you aren't an admin of a forum

You would need to setup a bot to continously scrape the site for new posts (which would cause a lot of speed issues if the forum is running off a bad server)
and then repeat the same process above



If you are still interested in setting up a tip bot I am able to develop one for you but we would need to discuss further