A small collaborative project, inspired by this video by Tom Scott, in an attempt to find the best Minecraft thing.
Quick disclaimer: All the code in this repository is... kinda bad. This was all sort of just thrown together in an attempt to make it as fast as we could, which may or may not have been a good idea. Anyways, if you end up on r/eyebleach after reading this, don't say I didn't warn you (:
The following information was grabbed from the Minecraft Fandom with pymediawiki:
- Title
- Summary (first sentence of each page)
- Image (using a custom scraper script)
- URL
All of this information was stored to a JSON file with around 8,000 articles found. We then wrote some cleanup scripts to remove the duplicates, articles on versions, people, etc. until we were left with around 2,000 left. From there, we went through them manually to get the existing list of 971 things.
The website was available at bestmcthing.ardun.me.
To install, clone the repository and install the requirements. cd backend and python main.py to start it on localhost:8080
The API is available at localhost:8080/ba24d209-064f-41a9-bffc-f5050a574e16. This UUID was originally put in place to obscure the API, however this didn't end up working for various reasons. When the user initially starts voting, you make an http get request to the base page (localhost:8080/ba24d209-064f-41a9-bffc-f5050a574e16 if you're developing locally), and that gives you a JSON list. That list contains two dictionaries, each of which contains the item info (image, url, title, summary, id). When the user votes, you send back a get request to localhost:8080/ba24d209-064f-41a9-bffc-f5050a574e16?0=id&1=id. The two parameters are 0 and 1. 0 indicates the ID of the item the user wants to downvote, and 1 indicates the ID of the item the user wants to upvote. The backend then saves this info, and sends back (with that same request) another set of items, and the cycle continues. If the user leaves, and doesn't vote for an item after an hour, the ID won't be valid anymore. Also if you send a request with IDs that haven't been requested, or IDs that were requested then voted with, the API will pretend like nothing happened but count it as an invalid request, to prevent scripts from spam voting (; If the user wants to skip you can send a skip parameter (localhost:8080/ba24d209-064f-41a9-bffc-f5050a574e16?0=id&1=id&skip) and the backend will log a skipped vote.
The frontend can be run by navigating to the reactjs directory, running npm install, and npm start.