Forum New Posts Notifier for NiftyHost

[RichardGv]

The script hasn't been updated for almost half a year, since I'm too lazy to publish the revisions I made. And I think there's nobody else using my script except me right now. :) But here it is, anyway:
Nightly 20110408:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/283669/python/ne...0110408.py
This revision includes many many changes so here's an annoyingly lengthy changelog:

1. Fixes the login issue of NiftyHost. Somehow the Cloudflare servers that you are using don't send cookies correctly when the script has a Python-ish user agent string. I added a fake Firefox user agent to deal with it. (Beware that this user-agent may break the operating system statistics of NiftyHost since it's a Linux x86_64 one. :) Don't consider that you have slept for 20 years (the future belongs to Linux!) when you wake up and find 60% of visits to NiftyHost forums come from Linux machines, Zack.)
   
2. Added custom HTTP header support.
   
3. Added DNS cache support to improve the speed for a little bit. Very ugly hack it is, though.
   
4. Better exception handling. The script is less likely to (yet still could possibly) exit automatically when it encounters an unhanded exception.
   
5. Added login formhash support for Discuz forums. Support for the "UCWeb forum" was added since one of my friends requested so, but it cannot check for new posts since seemingly Discuz doesn't support read/unread system at all! So essentially it can be used to periodically DDOS a Discuz forum only. :)
   
6. It should now be cross-platform out-of-box. I added platform detection to the script. This brings the possibility to, for instance, run the script from a Dropbox directory that is shared between a Windows system and a *nix one.
   
7. On *nix systems it prints messages with colors (ANSI escape sequences) by default.
   
8. Improved the modularity of the script so now it's easier to customize it.
   
9. More comments about the configuration options. I found writing comments harder than writing code since I always have to consider if an expression is appropriate in English -- which is my second language. :)
   

And nah, this is still nightly. It may cook a fried CPU as your breakfast "automagically" and "for free". Use it at your own risk! :D