Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
How might one create an application that communicates to an online website’s message board, say http://www.espn.com’s message boards that can retrieve posts, post stuff, and flag posts. How might somebody go about creating an application that does something like that? sockets?
I would like to create this in c++
This is actually more complicated than it sounds. Most message boards don’t open up their API (usually to prevent spam), and if they do, you’ll probably have to work with them to get the details.
The general idea is:
If you want to hack it, you’ll have to do some scraping/wireshark packet sniffing to figure out their API. There will probably be some cookies you’ll have to read to get communication tokens and whatnot. It’s possible, but it’s a lot of work.
Some other websites (like Twitter and Google) open up their API and actually provide developer tools to interact with their data. I don’t think a site like ESPN would be that open to hobbyist developers, so you’d probably have to sign some kind of agreement.
If you’re really interested, read up on HTTP (here’s a really simple beginning tutorial). Most APIs are built on the HTTP protocol, so you’ll want to become very familiar with it. I’d recommend using something besides C++ though, since socket work can be a bit tedious. Try something like Python.