Hey guys,

I wanted to get any opinions on how to use Fantomas ShadowMaker
efficiently. I recently purchased it and I haven't been able to
totally utilize it to its fullest potential.

Just wondering if anyone has written any scripts to automate some of
the process. Besides the actual form filling, what else can/did you
automate. The descriptions of each domain, x.cgi file, etc.

Thanks guys

Talk about "Fullest Potential" for a bit... what exactly are you missing?
What do you need to get done that it isn't doing?

The two most important things that I did for it, now a couple years ago -

1) Automate the process of some keyword issues - I'm afraid I can't even remember now what exactly it did (it was for a fellow BH at the time) there's one step in the generation process where you need to fill in keywords or something - I took a list of keywords and built the output tables that Dirk expects before creating the actual shadows - the important part here is that each step in the generation process is controlled by text files. You can generate these control files completely manually if you choose, and then simply execute the final generation script against them. It is not tough - and if you really want to go deep, ping Dirk, a mod here, who wrote the whole thing and could probably assist you if you get into trouble.

2) The other thing is that I didn't care for the look of the shadows at the time, and they didn't support sub-directories the way that I wanted to. So I wrote a little script that loaded up, modified and saved each file to look more the way that I wanted it to. Then I had managed templates that I applied to the shadows pretty much at will.

I know that's thin... I apologize, but it's been quite a while. As I mention at the top, if you have a specific goal in mind that would make it easier to comment...
/p

Hi Politik,

regarding the descriptions: You could generate lots of them automatically using for example ArticleBot.

If you host the shadow domains on your own server you should use a central installation of the botBase
(the database which contains the SE spiders IPs).

Doing this you have to install basically only the X.cgi file per shadow domain.

Dirk