Posting to Forums
Bearcat can prepare a forum post for a release and hand you a draft inside the forum, with the title and body already filled in. You open a link, check the post, and submit it yourself.
This is not full automation, and that is on purpose. Bearcat never sends a post for you. It saves a draft in the forum and gives you a preview link. You log into the same forum account in your browser, look the post over, and click submit. The reason is simple: nobody wants tools that post to forums on their own and turn into spam. This is a first step in that direction, with a person still doing the final click.
What you need first
Section titled “What you need first”- A distribution site, which is a forum account you added to Bearcat.
- A forum post template, so Bearcat knows what the post should look like. See Forum post templates.
- A release with finished uploads, so the template has links and data to fill in.
Setting up a distribution site
Section titled “Setting up a distribution site”Open Distribution sites in the sidebar and add one. Pick the forum, enter your username and password, and save. Your password is stored encrypted. Mark the site active and use the test login to check that the account works.
Supported forums right now are boerse.cx and data-load.me. Both run on XenForo, so more XenForo forums can be added without much effort.
Posting a release
Section titled “Posting a release”Open a release and go to the Overview tab. Click Post to forum, next to Render forum post.
Bearcat walks you through a few steps:
- Pick the distribution site you want to post to.
- Pick the subforum. The field is searchable, so you can type part of the name. Here you can also
edit the release name. Release names use dots, but some forums want spaces instead.
The Dots → spaces button rewrites the dots to spaces and turns the last hyphen, the release
group, into a spaced separator. The name you set here is used both to search for an existing
thread and as the title of a new thread.
- Bearcat searches the subforum for a thread that matches the name. If it finds one, it defaults to posting a reply into that thread. If it finds none, it starts a new thread.
- Pick a forum post template. Bearcat renders it with the release and shows the post body, which you can still edit. For a new thread you also set the title, and if the subforum uses prefixes (for example 1080p or x265) you can pick them here.
- Click Prepare draft. Bearcat saves the draft in the forum and shows an Open draft in forum link.
Sending the post
Section titled “Sending the post”Open the Open draft in forum link in the same browser where you are logged into that forum account. The forum editor opens with the title and body already filled in. Read it, use the forum’s own preview if you want, and submit.
The draft belongs to your forum account, so you need to be logged into the same account in your browser. If you are not, the editor will not show the prefilled text.
Once you have submitted the post in the forum, click I have posted in the dialog. Bearcat then looks up the post you just made — the new reply in an existing thread, or the thread you just created — and stores its permalink under Posted locations on the release (or collection). If it cannot find the post automatically (the forum’s search index can lag for a few seconds), it shows a field where you paste the URL yourself.
Recording the post is separate from marking the release as posted: I have posted remembers where you posted, while the Post Queue tracks whether a release still needs posting at all.
Posted locations
Section titled “Posted locations”Every release and collection has a Posted locations list — the URLs where it has been published, such as forum threads or WordPress pages. Post to forum fills it in for you, and you can also add or remove links by hand. Keep it up to date so you always know where to go if you ever need to swap out the download links.
How this fits with templates and the post queue
Section titled “How this fits with templates and the post queue”The post body comes from your forum post templates. The same template you would render and copy by hand is what Bearcat uses to build the draft, so you set the post up once and reuse it.
The Post Queue tells you which releases still need posting. For a forum you set up as a distribution site, Post to forum is the faster way to handle that step, since you do not have to copy and paste the rendered text into the forum yourself. The final submit and the Mark as posted step stay in your hands.