I used code from a github repo to make a lemmy repost bot from a reddit sub.

I tested it out, it seemed OK. So I let it run over night.

When I got back I found out it had been posting the same thing over and over again every few minutes. The account was banned for spam. But in the meantime it was very annoying to people. Also, there are a bunch of posts that can’t be removed because it’s impossible to remove federated stuff.

Is there a responsible way to test this stuff?

I don’t want to make spam, be annoying, etc. I feel bad about the spam bot.

  • empireOfLove@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Yes. Host your own Lemmy instance. It’s not that hard and can be run locally with no federation.

  • redballooon@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Technical problems aside, no one wants repost bots from Reddit. Nothing makes people unsubscribe faster from a sub than a ton of bot posts without comments.

    • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I thought these bots would be useful to quickly steal and or crosspost the content. But crossposting is… imperfect, and the bots arr far more annoying than useful. Oof.

    • maengdOP
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      1 year ago

      Ya I planned for it to be in a separate community from the native fediverse. Idea was to allow people to sub to the reddit repost if they wanted.

      It is lucky that I did that because otherwise this oopsie spambot thing might have got the native community in trouble, people unsub, reported, banned etc.

      • redballooon@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Ideally posts and comments are somewhat in a relationship. For a community with little traffic, posts will occur scarcely, and few subscribers will add and read comments in their time.

        If the community has few subscribers but many posts, any commented posts will be scrolled down so much that engagements stagnates.

        So yes, you are right. If a small community has a single human poster who posts all the time without commenters engagement, it’s the same problem.

        But a bot almost guarantees that any community it posts runs into that situation. You can’t automate human engagement.

      • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        And if you comment on a organic post, at least the original author is probably gonna read it. Engaging with a bot post is just wasted time typing something out that noone will ever read.

    • empireOfLove@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      It won’t fix the spam problem if stuff goes south though with things like repost bots. That’s a lot of excess traffic. OP definitely should host their own instance.

  • grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As an old programmer, always build in checks for your systems. Keep a cache of posted articles and check it before posting so you know you haven’t posted this one yet.

    When you let something run overnight, that’s going to go south somehow. If running overnight for the first time, throttle it to one post per hour. And not the same post. I’m the morning you check if it successfully posted a new article once per hour. Next let it post a little more frequently. Ease into your desired frequency once you have figured out all your edge cases and scale issues.

    And so forth.

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Also, don’t let it run against the live system the first time. Implement a “dry run” option which doesn’t post to Lemmy, but writes to a file or something similar. This way you can make sure nothing goes wrong in the parts aside from the Lemmy integration.

    • oleorun@lemmy.fan
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      1 year ago

      This is great advice, and to the OP, don’t feel bad. You’re really not an IT person of any caliber until you have experienced when I like to call the “Production Incident Experience”, or PIE. IT work is a job with unforseen consequences and hurdles, and we’ve all run into them at one point or another.

      This being a learning experience, do what we’ve all done and learn from it. Now you can set up logging, whatif, sandbox instance, whatever you have to do.

      You’re on the road to becoming a good programmer - just learn from your mistakes, do your research on best practices, ask intelligent questions, and in no time at all you’ll be writing one of these posts yourself.

      • freamon@endlesstalk.org
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        1 year ago

        Bots are clients that use the HTTP API

        Voyager was set up to test the app, but that doesn’t mean other clients can’t use it.

        Enterprise is full of random test communities that have many been populated by bots. I don’t understand how something like https://enterprise.lemmy.ml/c/mels_test (to pick a random one) isn’t useful for what you’re trying to do.

      • lemming934@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        These instances are specifically made for people testing code that interfaces with Lemmy. This includes front ends and bots.

        You should not use any communities on real instances since people will see your testing on their local page.

  • telepresence@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    good call asking for a proper venue to test this, but how do you mean you can’t remove federated stuff? i was under the impression (from lemmy’s homepage) that one of the features is 100% complete deletion by replacing post/comment content with ‘removed by user’. is this not the case?

  • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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    1 year ago

    Can you make your own community? If no one is subscribed to it, it shouldn’t federate anywhere, right?