Random Trigger

[Maleko7]

I am toying with an idea which may be useful for someone to set up to randomly send out a text message to someones phone to trigger them. This would be a random message sent to them within specific time periods and an optional cancel trigger.

My idea is a process where a person could fill out a web form with their cellphone number and have a trigger message sent to their phone (SMS). They would choose days of the week and a range of time between which the trigger could be sent. The system would choose a random time between these and would send the text message.

Then if the person wanted, another trigger could be sent to send to them. This ending trigger, if desired, could be sent either X number of hours after the start trigger was received or it could be sent at a specific time.

This would allow someone to do things like these examples:

1) A trigger could be sent on a Wednesday between noon and 8pm with no ending trigger. Perhaps the triggered event stops by itself or is a reminder or reinforcement.

2) They could schedule a start trigger on Friday nights sometime between 6pm and 10pm and have the ending trigger sent 14 hours later.

3) They could set a trigger to start on Sunday morning and to stop at 4pm, maybe before they have to start making dinner.

With a little work, this could be a paid service. There are a few free SMS services which use generic telephone numbers so that the sender does not have to use their own cellphone. There are also probably links to these services so that the process could run on a PC or Linux machine.

The idea is random texts within defined time frames. Texts are discrete and don't require the person to be logged in anywhere or have to queue up a trigger audio file.

I would be happy to pass along the pseudo code I have and one of the free SMS services I found. I just don't have time to actually implement this.

[bananashake2]

We have 2021, maybe a telegram bot might be a better and cheaper solution