Pull Request (link)

Bug Fixes

A huge issue this week with the nowplaying bot was there were many people tagging #nowplaying but not actually participating in the nowplaying community. The first fix made was changing the filtering from post.tags.includes(communityName) to post.category === communityName.

The results were better, but now there are some community members posting under music or another category and using nowplaying as a tag. The solution here is to begin approving authors. The post table in the database now includes a is_approved flag. Any author who has been approved in the past is automatically approved.There is a blacklist that will filter out people from unrelated topics or people abusing the bot.

This still leaves the new members who have legitimate posts and spammers using this tag. Anybody who follows a certain criteria can be automatically approved. For example: the #nowplaying bot posts weekly to start off the week. Any user who likes that post can be automatically approved. This leaves all community members and filters out unrelated content.

New Features

Commenting and Voting are now separate functions than the scrape function, and they are more aware. The did_comment and did_vote boolean columns in the database are used to keep track of which posts have been voted/commented on and which haven't. These can be run independently now, so you can have the bot comment on all posts (including spam) and only upvote approved content.

Now Playing

Check out the #nowplaying community and bot in action here

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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