Communicating with the outside world.

[DewiMorgan]

So I want to run external programs and/or scripts from LUA, specifically to auto-fill the reporting tool on users, to save me time when reporting spammers.

Obviously, we can't use system calls. So I'm thinking that I need a way to push messages to a monitoring script, probably AutoHotKey because it's what I know.

One possible way is to have it try to load a non-existent image like:
.../report/FredBloggs/Gold_farm_spamming.jpg

Another option is to have a small square at a pre-agreed location on the UI, and have it set the color of that square every few frames, to stream data to AHK, if AHK were monitoring those few pixels.

Can anyone think of any better methods?

And, can anyone think of any way for AHK to reply back to the script *while the user's using the keyboard and mouse*? So, can't really send a hotkey to focus a window that grabs input, wait for the window to appear, then send a stream of keys, because that would be disruptive.