A Reddit bot for the AmITheA**hole subreddit written using praw and the Python threading library.
The bot constantly runs a loop reading in new comments from the subreddit. When one is found that contains the phrase '!aita_bot' the bot will reply with counts and %'s of the votes in that thread. (YTA, NTA, ESH, NAH, or INFO).
Unfortunately the mods of AmItheAsshole were not bigs fans of my bot, although the users of the sub seemed to be (got my first gold!), and it has been perma-banned. It was partially my fault, at least. I didn't message them beforehand for permission. I just wasn't aware of the reddit culture around bots, specifically reddit mods. Lesson learned. I plan to turn a lot of this code into a reddit data collection and analysis tool. You can keep track of that project at aita_data_collector. I had a good time with this, and learned a lot regardless.
The main loop of the bot runs in the main thread. It reads in every new comment and looks for the '!aita_bot' phrase. When the phrase is found, the comment is put in a Queue to be picked up in its own thread. Several threads are constantly checking for new comments in the queue. When a thread picks up a comment it runs a function that will take the submission_id from the comment (the reddit submission that contains the comment), grab every comment from that submission, and use a regular expression to try to match one of the votes in question. When a vote is found, it is incremented as a key in a defaultdict. Once every comment has been crawled, a reply is constructed using the defaultdict keeping track of the votes. That reply message is then sent as a comment back to reddit, right underneath the comment that called the bot, and the thread goes back to looking for comments in the Queue.
I've chosen to run the the vote gathering and replying methods within their own thread because the operations can be very time consuming due to the large number of reddit API calls that have to be made. I wanted to keep the main thread running as often as possible to pick up new comments. I considered multiprocessing, but the operatons don't seem to put a large strain on the CPU as they're mostly calls out to reddit's servers, so the threading library seemed to best fit the bill..
I've added some error handling/logging and also a function to write comments that the bot makes out to a file as JSON, both of which write JSON out to a text file for me to check out later.
The bot runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ running Raspbian.
As of now (5/9/2019) I'm still making enough significant changes to the bot that I probably won't leave it running very often.
I expect that to change within the next week or so, as I iron out error handling and the like.
YTA has 11% of all of the comments with votes in this submisson. (102/901 total comments)
NAH has 16% of all of the comments with votes in this submisson. (152/901 total comments)
NTA has 67% of all of the comments with votes in this submisson. (612/901 total comments)
ESH has 3% of all of the comments with votes in this submisson. (31/901 total comments)
INFO has 0% of all of the comments with votes in this submisson. (4/901 total comments)
I am the AITA bot! Post '!aita_bot' in any AmITheAsshole submission and I'll reply to your comment with counts and percentages of how users voted in this thread.
Feel free to message the creator, /u/blarmon_kek with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!