As inspired by the bots on Reddit that respond to certain words, I’ve thrown together this code which allows anyone to set up their own response bot.

There is a bit more detail on Github, but in summary you can set your own trigger word and responses, and you have two modes of operation, “Exclude” which is the default and covers every community you’re federated with (and allows moderators of a community to PM the bot to exclude it) and “Include”, where you can pick a single community for the bot to be active in.

This is really early days and rough, but should work at the most basic level. Anyone who can provide some ideas/feedback/improvements - I’m totally open to them.

And to prove it works, I’m running Legolas Bot. Any comment you make below with the word “legolas” in will get a response (probably).

Small updates to reduce spaminess - will only reply to top level comments now.

Edit: Little updates include customisable polling rates and the ability to tag the comment creators name in a response.

  • threelonmusketeers
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    9 months ago

    There’s no way (that I know of) to grab only “new” comments - I don’t think the lemmy api has anything like that.

    Huh, that’s surprising. The desktop web interface and some apps (Connect) already show the number of new comments on a post:

    1000002280

    Seems strange that there is no way to identify which comments these are in the API. Might be a good feature request to propose for the Lemmy devs.

    • Demigodrick@lemmy.zipOP
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      9 months ago

      I could entirely be wrong, but I dont see anything obvious in the api that indicates this is a function of the api. You could potentially use markPostAsRead after scanning each comment, but I don’t see a way of pulling only new unread comments after that. Would love to be proven wrong though :)

      • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        You can call https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/comment/list?limit=20&sort=New&type_=All. In general I suggest trying things on the website and then checking in browser console which api endpoints it calls.

        • Demigodrick@lemmy.zipOP
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          9 months ago

          Thanks, this doesn’t pull only unread comments - if I pull the latest 5 comments and then mark those overarching posts as read, I get this:

          2024-02-02 09:52:11,278 - INFO - Requesting API Request.GET /comment/list
          2024-02-02 09:52:11,507 - INFO - Requesting API Request.POST /post/mark_as_read
          Post ID = 9335073
          Comment ID = 6915381
          2024-02-02 09:52:11,629 - INFO - Requesting API Request.POST /post/mark_as_read
          Post ID = 9007864
          Comment ID = 6915380
          2024-02-02 09:52:11,742 - INFO - Requesting API Request.POST /post/mark_as_read
          Post ID = 9319139
          Comment ID = 6915382
          2024-02-02 09:52:11,916 - INFO - Requesting API Request.POST /post/mark_as_read
          Post ID = 9334778
          Comment ID = 6915379
          2024-02-02 09:52:12,100 - INFO - Requesting API Request.POST /post/mark_as_read
          Post ID = 9283396
          Comment ID = 6915378
          

          If I then pull the 5 latest comments again:

          2024-02-02 09:52:12,238 - INFO - Requesting API Request.GET /comment/list
          2024-02-02 09:52:12,380 - INFO - Requesting API Request.POST /post/mark_as_read
          Post ID = 9335073
          Comment ID = 6915381
          2024-02-02 09:52:12,521 - INFO - Requesting API Request.POST /post/mark_as_read
          Post ID = 9007864
          Comment ID = 6915380
          2024-02-02 09:52:12,673 - INFO - Requesting API Request.POST /post/mark_as_read
          Post ID = 9319139
          Comment ID = 6915382
          2024-02-02 09:52:12,835 - INFO - Requesting API Request.POST /post/mark_as_read
          Post ID = 9334778
          Comment ID = 6915379
          2024-02-02 09:52:12,977 - INFO - Requesting API Request.POST /post/mark_as_read
          Post ID = 9283396
          Comment ID = 6915378
          

          Which is the same 5 comments - so what I’m looking for is a way to pull only previously “unseen” comments - that would reduce the amount of data returned from the api each time i check the list if there was only 1 or 2 comments rather than returning all 25.

          Apps can indicate that there are new unread comments on a post, but I assume they’re not doing this via the api and its a UI thing to do with caching?

          I may not have explained myself clearly here, though!

          • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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            9 months ago

            On GET /api/v3/post/list there is a field posts[0].unread_comments which the ui uses, probably based on mark as read endpoint. But that doesnt give you the comments themselves. So I think its better to call /api/v3/comment/list like once a minute, the amount of data returned is nothing to worry about. Still if you want to minimize it, call with limit=1 and compare the comment to see how many you missed in between, then make additional requests for those comments you dont have yet.