Well, I had this idea to help moderators, where you make a bot that acts like a moderator. (Doing only simple things like deleting duplicate posts, or merging double posts, or filtering out cusswords, or other things like that.)

My only problem is that I have no clue how to make a bot. >_< Can someone please explain how?

Visual Basic, doing one like that may be hard, I am not sure though as I have never attempted at a BOT in VB.

I think if it were for a PHP message board, it would be handiest to just write a PHP script that connects to the database itself and does the operations based on calculations etc. (for example, a double post has less than 1 minute in between, same thread ID, same poster and other conditionals). Then I guess you could make the PHP a chron job (whatchacallit) so it executes every 24 hours or something.

A very interesting idea

For IPB Board you could surely create a task which would automate. I don't really know how but it might be possible!

I'm almost certain it could be done in PHP, MySQL, and Visual Basic. It would take many hours and a lot of time to develop an IPB bot but the outcome would be great. You'll have to learn Visual Basic coding, which isn't too hard, but PHP might take some time. Visual Basic 6 (not Visual Basic .Net) would be best suited for making a bot, using winsock to communicate with the server.

Ive seen these bots before that are pre-built to do this and you can customize them to your liking. I would try searching google for "forum moderation bots" or some other string that is similar to this.