Community Bot - Whitelist, Membership Notifications, and More!

It's been about a month since I first released the Community Bot software (which you can read about here) and I'm really happy to see a number of people using it to help support all sorts of various different communities already!

I've gotten a lot of great feature suggestions since then and I've finally gotten some time to implement them - plus also some much needed bug fixes.

Membership Whitelist

This was definitely the most obvious feature that really should have been implemented right from the start, but nevertheless you can now specify a whitelist for the members who can join and receive upvotes from the bot. You can set this using the following settings:

"whitelist_only": true,
"whitelist_location": "whitelist.txt",

If "whitelist_only" is set to true, then only accounts listed in the whitelist will be allowed to join. The "whitelist_location" property should point to either a file location or URL containing a list of Steem account names of the whitelisted members with one name per line.

If anyone tries to join who is not on the whitelist by sending a STEEM payment, their payment will be refunded with a message indicating that they must be on the whitelist to join. If someone tries to join via delegation who is not on the whitelist, the bot software cannot return that, but it will send a 0.001 STEEM transfer with the same message.

The message can be changed using the "whitelist_only" property in the "transfer_memos" object in the config.json file.

Membership Notification Transfer Memos

In addition to the transfer memo mentioned above if people try to join who are not on the whitelist, when someone successfully joins or updates their membership they can now receive a 0.001 STEEM transfer memo confirming their membership status.

These messages can also be set in the "transfer_memos" object in config.json. There is one for members paying with STEEM which includes the date through which their membership is valid, and a separate one for members paying with an SP delegation:

"member_valid_thru": "Membership updated for @{to}. Membership valid through: {tag}.",
"member_full_delegation": "Membership updated for @{to}. Full amount delegated, membership is valid indefinitely while delegation remains."

Comment and Resteem options for posts upvoted by the bot

You can now set the bot to automatically post a comment and/or resteem any post it upvotes. There are two new settings in the config.json file for this:

"comment_location": "comment.md",
"resteem": true,

The "comment_location" property points to a file containing the comment message text and if "resteem" is set to "true" then the bot will resteem posts it upvotes. Not much more I can say about that!

Flag Signal Accounts and Blacklisted Tags

These are features which were ported over from the Post Promoter voting bot software. You can set them using the following new settings in config.json:

"flag_signal_accounts": ["spaminator", "cheetah", "steemcleaners", "mack-bot"],
"blacklisted_tags": ["nsfw"],

The bot will check if any of the accounts listed in the "flag_signal_accounts" array have flagged/downvoted the post. If they have that indicates that the post is some type of spam or plagiarism and the bot will not upvote it and will move on to the next member in the list.

The bot will also check if the post contains any tags listed in the "blacklisted_tags" array and, if so, it will not upvote the post and move on to the next one by that member.

Whitelisted Tags

Last, but not least, the opposite of the "blacklisted_tags" setting above, there is now also a "whitelisted_tags" setting! This is useful for communities who only want the bot to upvote posts that are using the tag for that community (or whatever other tags they want). You can set the list of whitelisted tags as follows:

"whitelisted_tags": ["your-community-tag"],

If one or more whitelisted tags are specified, then the bot will check each post to make sure it contains at least one of the whitelisted tags before it votes on it. If a post does not contain any whitelisted tags then it will move on to the next post made by that member.

Want to run a bot for your community?

If you would like some help hosting/running/modifying the bot to meet the specific needs of your community, feel free to reach out to me on Discord or Steem.Chat and hopefully we can work something out!

Links to relevant commits:

• Added whitelist support and membership notification transfer memos
• Added comment and resteem options for upvoted posts
• Added flag signal accounts and blacklisted tags
• Added whitelisted tags

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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