Train ScrapeBox to Create Forum Profiles

While this may look like A LOT of text to read through, it is actually incredibly simple. You could even “wing it” once you read right up until my instructions as it will probably cause a light to come on. If not, just read the whole thing, it’s not that painful I promise
SweetFunny, if you read this, I’m not taking anything at all away from Scrapebox. It is by far the most useful piece of software I have EVER purchased, particularly when referring to the cost to usefulness ratio. I also know you’re literally always working on making SB a better bit of software. I don’t want this post to come across as “You’re not doing enough” but rather, “Scrapebox is incredible, look what else it can do.”

Alright, I’ve been keeping this to myself for awhile now, but I think it’s time to share (maybe it will encourage SweetFunny to make it a full addition to this already incredible software…you’ll see what I mean in a second).

NOTE: I’ve only done/tested this on phBB forums.

When you think of ScrapeBox, I bet you think of blogs (or scraping, or proxy testing, or whatever you use it for…I mean, it does so many things already). Well, awhile back SweetFunny added an amazing feature that I think many of you probably didn’t realize could be used for other things: a “learning” mode.

The learning mode basically allows you to teach ScrapeBox new form fields it didn’t previously recognize…but not just for blogs as you might have thought. It’s ANY form. This means forum sign-up fields too

Now, I mention in the title of this thread that it will only speed it up, not fully automate it. That’s because, unfortunately, ScrapeBox doesn’t presently support learning the password & captcha fields.

It will fill in the rest for you, but those have to be done manually (hint hint SweetFunny )

Anyway, heres how you do it:

Step 1: Make a folder somewhere designated to your new “forum signup” URLs. In this folder, create 4 .txt files & name them:

Usernames.txt (this will be opened in the same place you currently open the “names.txt” file for blog commenting)

Emails.txt (this will be opened in the same place you currently open the “email.txt” file for blog commenting). The difference here is, you’re going to have to use real emails, as you’ll need to click confirmation links

Websites.txt (this will be opened in the same place you currently open the “websites.txt” file for blog commenting).

Password.txt (this will be opened in the same place you currently open the “comments.txt” file for blog commenting).

Forum URLs.txt (this will be opened in the same place you currently open the “blog list.txt” file for blog commenting. The difference here is you’re going to need to fill this with the registration URLs of forums. See step 2)

Step 2: You’re going to need to get yourself some phBB forum registration URLs. They look like this: http://www.someforum.com/profile.php?mode=register

Thing is, if you visit that URL, you have to first click a link agreeing to their terms & conditions & you can’t train SB to click links (at the moment). Don’t worry though, there is a way around this. Add this to that URL & you’ll skip that “agree to our terms” page and be taken straight to the registration page: &agreed=true

Step 3: Open up SB and choose to comment manually. Also, open the files you made in step 1 in SB in the areas designated in the instructions in step 1.

Step 4: Click “Start Posting”. Now, you’re going to see a window open up with your forum URLs at the top and a window below. Start clicking on each URL one at a time at the top. They will load in the window below. You have to “teach” SB a bunch of these before it can full start filling them all in on it’s own. Around 20 or so and you won’t have to teach it any more and all you’ll have to fill out is captchas.

Step 5: So, click the first URL in the list and wait until it has fully loaded (there is a loading bar at the bottom right hand corner of SB). Once it has fully loaded, a “learn” button at the bottom of SB’s window will become clickable. Click that button.

Step 6: After you click learn, again, wait until the page has fully loaded. Once it has, start clicking fields.

First: Click the username field. Once you click it, a window will appear on the bottom right hand side of SB that asks you to “tell” it what field that is. Well remember that you filled the “name.txt” file with usernames. So tell SB that the “username” field is the “name” field. DON’T CLICK APPLY YET. You don’t click apply until you’ve taught SB all 4 fields.

Second: Click the email field. Teach SB that field is the email field by clicking the email radio button.

Third: Skip over the two password fields, as you can’t teach them to SB right now (again, hint hint SF). Go straight to the “website” field. Click on it, and tell SB that is the “website” field.

Fourth: Go to either the occupation/interests/location field and teach SB that is the comment field (yes, the comment file is filled with your password, but that doesn’t matter. SB won’t allow you to continue unless you teach it all the fields.).

Fifth: Click the submit button & teach SB that is the submit button.

Sixth: Click apply

After you click apply, the learning mode window will close and the page will reload. It will auto fill all the fields you just taught it. Now, to fill the password fields, simply right click on them and then click on “insert comment” (which inserts your password because that is what you saved in the password.txt file which you should have selected in the same place you would normally select your comment.txt file for blog commenting.)

Do this 20 or so odd times (at the most) and you won’t have to teach SB anything anymore. It will just know all the forms on it’s own.

WARNING: Not all registration pages have enough fields for you to “teach” them to SB (it won’t “learn” a registration page unless you can teach it all the fields).

In those cases, when you come across them, you can always just right click and fill the fields by selecting the appropriate item from the list that appears.

This speeds up the forum registration process considerably. Now, since you can turn on the learning database in slow poster mode, all SweetFunny has to do, is allow us to do three things:

Teach it the password fields, captcha fields & allow us to teach registration pages to SB even when we haven’t selected all fields…(last hint SF, I promise )

In a perfect world, there would also be the addition of a file to open “signatures” and you would fill that with the phBB code to post signatures with clickable links with selectable anchor text.