A welcome bot for local communities

Steem has a constantly growing user base, and this is the same with our local community: tr. Onboarding new users is a hard task to do it right, because, people register here after they see the "write stuff and get paid" kinda promotions.

A new user to steem is most likely confused, they generally don't read much the official FAQ, and jump into pushing content directly. Or, they don't know english well yet to understand things clearly.

We have a couple of guides written by community members in turkish. And we were giving these links to new users manually - which is a challenging task with the current growth rate with new users.

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Since I have experience in parsing blocks in the chain, I have decided to code a simple welcome bot. It does two simple things:

• Post links guide series in turkish
• Post links about "how not to post"
• Transfer 0.002 SBD to the user for they to register minnowsupport, banjo bots.
• Invites them to our community discord server.

Bot is triggered by comments. You can give a human welcome to the user, and comment @botaccountname !welcome. Then it wil post the welcome message.

Bot was in the test trial in the last couple of days and looks like it's working well.

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It's open source

Repository: https://github.com/emre/communitybot

Installation

mkvirtualenv -p python3.6 communitybottestenv
pip install steem
pip install dataset
git clone https://github.com/emre/communitybot
cd communitybot

Configuration

You can use config.json.example as an example. Create a config.json file
using this and edit the parameters accordingly.

Parameters

keys

Bot account's and active private keys. If you don't plan to send welcome gifts,
then you can skip the active private key.

account

Bot's username in the steem network.

mysql_uri

Mysql connection string. Bot uses a mysql database to store welcome logs in order to
prevent duplicate welcome messages for same users.

nodes

RPC nodes in a list. I use https://rpc.buildteam.io personally.

welcome_message

This should point to a file formatted with markdown. Turkish example exists in the repository.
Make sure you enter the absolute file path here.

blacklisted_users

If some users abuse the bot, you can enter them into the list. Bot will ignore
the commands generated from these accounts.

send_welcome_gift

yes -> Send welcome git
no -> Don't send anything

welcome_gift

Welcome gift amount. Only need if you set send_welcome_gift as yes.

welcome_gift_message

Memo of the welcome_gift transfer.

After editing the configuration accordingly, you can run the bot as

python communitybot/communitybot.py /tmp/communitybot/config.json

And it will start listening transactions.

Supervisord config

To make sure bot process is alive and running, you can use supervisord. Here is my config for tr community bot:

[program:turbot]
command = /var/www/envrock/bin/python3.6 /home/emre/communitybot/communitybot/communitybot.py /home/emre/turbot.config.json
stdout_logfile = /var/www/turbot.log
stderr_logfile = /var/www/turbot.log
redirect_stderr = True

Feel free to raise questions if you plan to use it.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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