This is an app designed to remotely read the contents of bulletin boards on SpinDizzy MUCK and expose it in various ways. It requires a bit of set-up MUCK side to get it working and a login there, which should ideally be a dedicated bot @set 'H(aven)'.

Although this project was made specifically for SpinDizzy, with some modification it should work for other FuzzBall MUCK that have CorkBoard.muf installed. Notably, you'll need to change a dbref in get_posts.muf.

If you get stuck, bother Regan on SpinDizzy.

These instructions assume you have a SpinDizzy character with a M1 bit, preferably one designed to operate as a bot. Using your own account should be fine for testing, though.

1. Copy the contents of (get_posts.muf)[muf/get_posts.muf] and make a program out of it (if you don't know much about MUF or using the editor http://www.universitymuck.org/book/export/html/14 may be a good starting place). I named mine read-posts.muf but you can name your program whatever you wish.
2. Create an action somewhere your bot can access it and link it to the program you made. I named mine process_posts and attached it to the room my bot lives in:

@action process_posts=here
@link process_posts=read-posts.muf

3. Test your command. e.g. process_posts +read. If everything is set up correctly, you'll see the contents of the bulletin board fly by.

FuzzBall's security is somewhat Kafkaesque: With M1 permissions in MUF, we can look up the dbref of a global name like +read, but we can't remotely look up the name of dbref we pull off the board like |owner: #2057. However, using MPI we can't look up the dbref of a global that's not in the same room as us--but we can look up the name of any dbref. So to get people-friendly character names instead of dbrefs, we're going to need a bit of mpi that can look-up dbrefs.

4. Make an action where your character/bot can access it, link it to $nothing and give it a success value of --- NAME: {name:{&arg}}. e.g.:

@action getname=here
@link getname=$nothing
@succ getname=--- NAME: {name:{&arg}}

It's important that the @succ value is set up exactly as the above for the program to work.

5. Try an owner value from the board listings you outputted earlier. e.g. getname #2056. You should see something like --- NAME: Morticon.

Once you've set up the above and confirmed the MUCK side of the world is working, it's time to setup and the Python app. I recommend that you use a virtual environment for this set-up (e.g. python3 -m venv ve), but it's not necessary.

This code has been tested with Python 3.5, but should probably work in 2.7 and 3.6.

1. Activate your virtual environment if any.
2. pip install -r requirements.txt
3. cp config.toml.sample config.toml
4. Open config.toml with your favorite editor and fill in the values appropriately for how you've set up your muck environment.
5. Test it: python spindizzy_boards/spindizzy_boards.py and check out the webserver according to the port you set up in config.toml. e.g. http://localhost:7000/sdb/+read

During development, it can be useful to test without a live MUCK connection, account, M1-bit, etc. For those purposes there's a fake_muck setting in config.toml. Setting it to true will make the webserver use fake content instead of making a connection. You'll still need to have a boards entry with at least +read defined in your config.toml file.

There's plenty of work left to do if people are interested:

• Atom integration for feed readers
• Twitter integration
• RSS feed generation if people desire it
• Re-architect the app into a json exposing endpoint with a react front-end
• SSL support, even though we'll usually run behind nginx
• Posts should be saved historically in a SQLAlchemy database
• Move CSS into static assets for a little more efficiency.
• Confirm atom links work well in MoinMoin

Thanks to Kelketek of Winter's Oasis for the CorkBoard.muf implementation, whose API makes this easy.

Thanks to Kandra, Morticon, Niny'ah, and Ping on SpinDizzy for discussion and feedback.