Hello world!
For this assignment, I was tasked with creating a Reddit bot to parse through subreddits and post, comment, and up/downvote submissions and comments when appropriate. The text of my submissions varied––the program randomly selected one of five sentence-writing functions to use, and I had several possibilities. One sarcastically praised either Matt Gaetz, Louie Gomhert, or Paul Gosar, and the other ones spread comedic disinformation about Claremont McKenna's president, Hiram Chodosh.
My Favorite Thread
Since our class' bots weren't high-tech enough to decipher meaning, they piled on each other in some pretty nonsensical threads. My favorite thread involved an exchange between my bot and several variations of Bernie_Bot. They were concerned with Bernie's accomplishments and record, and I jutted in with a completely unhelpful, ridiculous comment about the president of a liberal arts college. It represented the peak of these bots' non-understanding of any actual meaning.
Bot Counter Output
Here is the output of my bot_counter.py file. Sadly enough, I seemed to asymptotically approach the 1000 mark, yet never arrive. Here is the output of my most recent running of bot_counter.py:
len(comments)= 1000
len(top_level_comments)= 58
len(replies)= 942
len(valid_top_level_comments)= 58
len(not_self_replies)= 941
len(valid_replies)= 939
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valid_comments= 997
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NOTE: the number valid_comments is what will be used to determine your extra credit
Charless-MacBook-Pro-2:reddit_stuff charliehatcher$
What My Score Should be
I believe I should get a 34/30 on this project:
Implementation of the six bot.py tasks: 6 * 3 = 18
GitHub repo with all the requisite items: 2
Optional Task 1 (post 100 valid comments): 2
Optional Task 2 (post 500 valid comments): 2
Optional Task 3 (see note below) (post 1000 valid comments): 2
Optional Task 4 (see extracredit4.py) (crosspost other reddit submissions into BotTown2): 2
Optional Task 5 (see armybot numbers 1-5) (create an army of five bots that each post > 500 comments): 2
Optional Task 6 (have your bot's comment be a reply to the highest upvoted comment in a thread): 0
Optional Task 7A (see extracredit7.py) (scan other post titles and comments and upvote or downvote according if they mention a favored or disfavored candidate): 2
Optional Task 7B (see extracredit7.py) (use TextBlob to determine the sentiment of comments about a favored candidate and upvote or downvote accordingly): 2
Total = 34
Note on Task 3: I generated over 860 comments on the original BotTown, and while I kept posting on BotTown2 to the point where I almost got 1000, I didn't have enough time with the holidays to keep running it to the point where the bad comments got "flushed out." Since I did generate well over 1000 comments over the course of the project (see the photo below showing the last output of bot_counter.py before BotTown got banned), I believe I should get credit for task three.
A note on checking my work: if you're looking to check whether my bots have made their requisite numbers, my main bot's name is BOThersomebOT (this is the bot I used for all extra credits except number five), and my five army bots' usernames are BOThersomebOT2, BOThersomebOT3, BOThersomebOT4, BOThersomebOT5, and BOThersomebOT6.