Murdoch Alive Check was just an amusing programming project that made me laugh that I made for reddit before they tripped and fell face-first into the pavement.

It’s a pretty simple bot. It checks Wikipedia to see if Murdoch’s entry has a death date. Then it randomly combines two sentence fragments in an attempt to create a funny post title if Murdoch is still alive.

What made this project great in my mind was that it took advantage of reddit’s subreddit settings to, if Murdoch died, sticky a post and set the sub to restricted. The bot would thank everyone for their participation, and then the bot would exit. It was set to randomly post anywhere from every 1.5 and 4 days so it would be randomized, and feel more organic.

The subreddit was totally self-contained, it was a “set-it-and-forget-it” project. I tried to open the community here and a bot started making dozens of posts a day from reddit to this community. So I had to set it to mod-posts only which kind of killed the original idea. But I will find another way to make it work, but the project is moving to another instance.

Join me over here if you’re interested! [email protected]