III. Creating a Comment Scraper
Step 1: On the “Create New Scraper” page, select “Comment Scraper” from the “Kind” drop-down.
Step 2: Copy the URL you want to scrape for comments and paste into the “Calendar URL” field.
Step 3: If it is a website powered by another site we scrape and identically formatted, you can select that scraper’s script from the “Script” drop-down, otherwise leave this blank.
EX. OhMyRockness and Hype Machine.
Step 4: Select the “Comment Kind” from the drop-down:
-> “Upcoming event” if the comments preview events - the user will "vote" on the event and the comment will appear on the event's page
-> “Band” if the comment reviews or lists bands - the comment will appear on each bands' page
Step 5: If the user should be set to automatically follow whatever bands it scrapes or bands associated with the events it scrapes, check “Follow Bands.”
Note: If the user is set to auto-vote in its profile, this will cause the user to vote on whatever events those bands play listed on your metro in the future.
Step 6: Copy and paste the ID of the user associated with the comments in the “Auto-Vote User ID” field.
Step 7: Check “Automatic.”
Step 8: Check “Auto-approve” ONLY if this comment is not actually bringing in comment text but will serve as an automatic way to pull in user votes.
Step 9: Check “Prefs Cross Metro” if this comment scraper is relevant to all other metros (only "Band" comment scrapers), such as a new Pitchfork comment scraper. This will make the user and comments appear on every metro’s site.
Step 10: Check “Manual Interval” if you will be manually running the scrape to approve comments rather than having the scraper run automatically to either pull in votes or comments into the queue.
Step 11: If you selected a script above, click “Create.”
-OR- If you did not select a script above, check “Needs Script” and continue to the next set of instructions (IV).
IV. Creating a Comment Scraper - Requesting a New Upcoming Events Script
The script request is how the scraper will read all data to pull for your site. We cannot scrape any events listed in a Flash format or in image posters or PDF. All scraped sites must have information presented in a consistent format for the scraper to read and pull the data.
Step 1: If the “Comment Kind” you requested above was “Upcoming Events,” open a new tab or window to an example of the comment on an upcoming event you wish to scrape, either on the main URL you entered above or a link from that URL.
Step 2: Identify the START DATE + VENUE of the event.