Hi folks,
I reached out to the Lemmy admins about taking over the community from the previous moderator (as they’d become inactive).
I’m not making any big changes or anything. The biggest news is that I will be hooking up Auto_Post_Bot@social.packetloss.gg (which you may have seen in other gaming communities, some I moderate some I don’t 🙂) to post Last Epoch news and keep the community up to date!
I’ll work on getting a banner up and an icon in the coming days to make things look a bit nicer around these parts as well.
Thanks for reading, I hope you find Auto Post Bot helpful going forward, and hope everyone has a great day!
Have you seen much interaction with the bot posted threads? I have bots disabled/hidden and have quite enjoyed the experience. Blocking novelty bot accounts gets old very quickly.
Good question! It varies a lot. I think a lot of Lemmy users are typically lurkers.
News posts in general are pretty low-engagement unless it’s particularly exciting news. These things tend to get a fair number of up votes but few (if any) comments (here’s an example of one that was fairly popular in the 2007scape community https://social.packetloss.gg/post/477083).
I think it’s still pretty useful content typically as it allows folks to (fairly) reliably use Lemmy communities to keep up with official news posts and discuss them if there’s something worth discussing.
I used to post various news items manually but found it quite time consuming (and regularly they’d also get little interaction unless they were a particularly exciting update). You can see this with the recent posts in this community by @Blxter@lemmy.zip (if you’re reading this Blxter@lemmy.zip, thanks – but hopefully we can both sit back and relax now 😎🌴!).
I’d generally recommend against blocking all bots and just block the bots at a user level that you find unhelpful (that’s been my approach anyways).
EDIT: For additional context, Auto Post Bot in particularly is always official news and/or relevant news feeds for a particular community that I’ve added as “sources” for it to monitor and repost (for games, that’s normally the steam news feed; but it’s not strictly speaking limited to Steam or even RSS feeds). There was one unfortunate incident where I made a mistake adding the Zed.dev RSS feed and it ended up posting in a very spammy fashion but that was some user error on my part as its programmer/administrator more than anything else 😥.
Thanks for the suggestion. I turned off bots pretty early on so I was fresh from reddit which is packed with novelty accounts like “your comment is in alphabetical order!” or “you said the word hippo lol!” type bots. I’ll re-enable them and see how it goes. Thanks for all you do!
Cheers. I have been thinking of starting one or two communitys of my own as well and have been thinking of doing a bot for posts aswell how hard are they to set up? I have been looking at this one https://github.com/programming-dot-dev/rss-bot
I have a custom Python library based back end, that itself is based on Tornado and Beautiful Soup. It makes it pretty easy to script up inputs and outputs for various kinds of sources and destinations. The Auto Post Bot is actually both a Lemmy bot and a Telegram bot.
I’ve thought about open sourcing it … but I’m mildly concerned about it being abused to make spam bots (it’s extremely efficient and capable of hitting rate limiting systems and perfectly timing its next post to what they’ll accept) so I’ve held off 😅 Well, that and I may want to rework some parts of it…
import asyncio
import lemur_repost
def create_test_pool(lemmy_bot: lemur_repost.LemmyBot):
pool = lemur_repost.RepostPool(
lemur_repost.PersistentStateStore(Path('bar'))
)
pool.add_input(lemur_repost.RSSFeedAgent(
'https://store.steampowered.com/feeds/news/app/594650/',
{
'cc': 'US',
'l': 'english',
'snr': '1_2108_9__2107'
},
DEFAULT_RSS_POLLING_RATE_POLICY
))
pool.add_output(lemur_repost.LemmyCommunityPostAgent(
lemmy_bot,
LEMMY_BOT_PLAYGROUND_ID
))
return pool
def main():
lemmy_bot = lemur_repost.LemmyBot(
'https://social.packetloss.gg',
'Testing_Bot',
'<password>',
lemur_repost.PollingRatePolicy(
timedelta(
minutes = 10
)
)
)
test_pool = create_test_pool(lemmy_bot)
asyncio.run(lemur_repost.run_pools([
test_pool
]))
main()
I feel like it was kind of, maybe, a mistake to give each pool its own storage (edit: actually that’s probably more a limitation of how I’ve been using the library than the library itself … it’s always fun when “yesterday me” was smarter than “today me”). I’d also like to make it possible to write bridges of sorts … which was an original goal (e.g., you could use this to bridge a Discord, Telegram, and Matrix chat + tie in news feeds from a dozen places in a handful of lines).
