Complete exasperation with sending POST requests to StackOverflow

Question

I am trying to send a POST request to Meta using my account... but it's just not working very well. Using netcat, I was able to post one comment, but I have had no luck getting it to work with a PHP script.

I used a TCP monitor to capture the packets going back and forth between my browser and the server and managed to figure out some of it.

I am hoping someone on the team can help me here. Here is the POST request I'm sending:

POST /posts/51812/comments HTTP/1.1
Host: meta.stackoverflow.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0
Accept: text/html, */*
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
Referer: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/51812/
Cookie: usr=*********; somusr=*********
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Length: 87

comment=This+comment+was+posted+from+someplace...&fkey=********

As you can see, a normal request. I have a few questions though:

• What is the fkey parameter for? Where does it come from? What I have been doing thus far is fetching the page I want to post the comment on and using a RegEx to dig up the value.
• Why does the server return the following and what does it mean?

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Location: /error?aspxerrorpath=/posts/51812/comments
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 01:44:07 GMT
Content-Length: 171
...

Any help or pointers would be appreciated.

Answer 1

This is by design. We don't want bots posting here, and I won't be providing any information to assist in the creation of said bots.

Answer 2

Hi George. I hacked together something that works (pending any changes in StackOverflow's URLs and webpage structure). Here is the github: https://github.com/danchoi/ask_stack

My solution involves using SeleniumRC/Firefox as an intermediary between the command line tool and the StackOverflow server. This will let you post a question to StackOverflow from the unix command line.

By the way, my goal is not to faciliate spamming SO. I had a problem, which is that I wanted to write my StackOverflow questions in Vim and post them from the command line, and I hacked a solution.