[2008] App that connects to a Forum w Login/Pass

Hi all,

How would I go about writing an app that connects to a web forum (phpbb / vbulletine) ? I have built the forms, controls and other aspects of the gui and done all the validation, but am now facing an obstacle when it comes to connecting to a particular forum by passing both the username and password.

ultimately i want to be able to connect to 5 forums that i am a member of, each with a seperate login and password set and then post a single message. The challenge at the moment is how to pass the password and username to the various forums, and also how to proceed once i have connected to a specific forum (or subforum) which i only know by name. i know web forums have forum id's which can be accessed by php (but only if you are an admin) but how can i access say the .net forum on this particular forum and post a post here ?

Any hints or other useful suggestion would be most appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Quivver

When you create your webrequest, you will need to first login by submitting to the login form (check the <form> tag). Upon login, you will, in the Response stream, receive a cookie collection. Every subsequent request you make will need to take the cookie collection and assign it to the CookieContainer property of your request. It's just a matter of submitting a form so your requests need to POST to the pages specified in the FORM's action attributes.

Get started on that, meanwhile I may need to check on the 'validity' of your request as automated postings aren't exactly something that should be discussed (potential spam and all that).

Thank you very much for the tips. I'll assure you this program is not for distribution, it's just a small utility that will save me some time for my personal posting.

i'm going to try to implement some of the approaches you have suggested. Again, thanks for the help, it's been an invaluable stepping stone. For some reason there is very little information on how to access currently existing web sites when it comes to .net books (and i have quite a few of them). Most seem to be concerned with either basic programming or database (.ADO) and building web applications (.ASP).