PointsBot

Table of Contents

• Description
• Installation
• Prerequisites & Configuration
• Usage
• Terms of Use for a bot for Reddit
• License

Description

This is a bot for Reddit that monitors solutions to questions or problems in a subreddit and awards points to the user responsible for the solution.

This bot was conceived as a response to this request.

For more information about running bots for Reddit made with the Python programming language, see this pinned post in r/RequestABot.

The bot will award a point to a redditor when the OP of a submission includes "!Solved" or "!solved" somewhere in a reply to the redditor's comment on that submission. These points will allow the redditor to advance to different levels.

At each level, the redditor's flair for the subreddit will be updated to reflect their current level. However, the bot should not change a mod's flair.

Each time a point is awarded, the bot will reply to the solution comment to notify the redditor of their total points, with a progress bar to show how many points they need to reach the next level and a reminder of the title of the next level. In order to prevent the progress bar from being excessively long, some points will be consolidated into stars instead. Right now, stars are hard-coded to represent 100 points each, but this behavior may be configurable in the future.

The first time a point is awarded, the bot's reply comment will also include a brief message detailing the points system.

Only the submission OP's first "!Solved" comment should result in a point being awarded for each submission.

Installation

Basic Installation

IN PROGRESS

Advanced Installation

Requirements:

• Python 3 (specifically version 3.7 or greater)
• pip (should be installed automatically with Python)
• pipenv
  • After installying Python & pip, install by running pip install pipenv
  • For other installation options, see here

First, download this project using git or by downloading a ZIP archive from the Github repository using the green Clone or download button. If ZIP, be sure to extract the files from the archive before moving on.

To install the packages necessary for running the bot, navigate to the project root directory and run pipenv install. To uninstall (i.e. delete the project's virtual environment and the installed python packages), navigate to the project root directory and instead run pipenv --rm.

Prerequisites & Configuration

Bot account

In order to make a bot, you must first have a bot account. This could be a personal account, but it is recommended to create a dedicated account for the bot, especially one with the word "bot" somewhere in the name.

Once you have that, you can create a Reddit app for the bot. This is needed for authenticating with Reddit.

1. First, go to your app preferences.
2. Select the "are you a developer? create an app..." button.
3. Provide a name for the bot, which could probably be the same as the account's username.
4. Select the "script" radio button.
5. Provide a brief description.
6. For the "about url", you can provide a link to the Github repository: https://github.com/cur33/PointsBot
7. Since it is unused, the "redirect uri" can be set to something like: http://www.example.com/unused/redirect/uri
8. Select "create app".

You should be redirected to a page which contains the credentials you will need; under the name of the bot is the unlabeled client_id, and below that with the label "secret" is the client_secret.

If you have already done this in the past, the client_id and client_secret can be found by navigating to your app preferences and selecting the "edit" button for the app under the "developed applications" section.

Make the bot a mod in your subreddit

Some of the bot's behaviors, e.g. altering redditor flairs, require moderator permissions. It should require just the "Flair" and "Posts" permissions and perhaps the "Access" permission, so you don't need to grant it full permissions.

Configuration file

The bot will store its configuration file in a .pointsbot directory under the home directory for your user on your machine. By default, this directory is also where it will store its database and log files, but you can alter this behavior by specifying other locations for those in the configuration process.

If this is your first time running the bot, then it will fail to detect a configuration file and will prompt you for the necessary fields. This includes the credentials for the Reddit account and Reddit app which you created for the bot in the Prerequisites & Configuration step above. The bot will create the configuration file and save this information for future use.

At the moment, there is not a good way to edit the existing configuration unless you want to edit the configuration file yourself (see next paragraph). This is the recommended process for editing the configuration until this feature is added:

1. Go to your home directory and open the .pointsbot directory.
2. Either rename the pointsbot.toml file to something else, or move it to a different directory.
3. Open that file in a text editor (if you haven't installed one, you can use the default text editor for your operating system, like Notepad on Windows).
4. Run the bot and walk through the configuration process again, copying and pasting any unchanged values from the original configuration file.
5. Once you are finished, you can either keep the old configuration file for a while just in case, or you can delete it.

If you'd prefer, you can instead create and edit the configuration file yourself. You will need to copy pointsbot.sample.toml to a new file called pointsbot.toml located in the .pointsbot directory mentioned above. Any instances of the word "REDACTED" should be replaced with the appropriate values; other values should work as-is, but can be changed as needed.

This is because the config file can contain sensitive information, and maintaining only sample versions of these files in this repository helps developers to avoid accidentally uploading that sensitive information to a public (or even private) code repository.

More information on the specific config options can be found in the comments in the sample config file.

You shouldn't have to worry about it, but if you need it, information on the TOML syntax used for the file can be found on TOML's Github page.

Usage

Basic Usage

IN PROGRESS

Advanced Usage

The simplest way to run the bot is to navigate to the project root directory and run:

pipenv run python PointsBot.py

Terms of use for a bot for Reddit

Since this is an open-source, unmonetized program, it should be considered non-commercial, and is thus allowed to use the Reddit API without registration. However, this bot is provided under the permissive MIT license, so if your use of the bot becomes commercial, you should read the Reddit API terms and register here.

License

Copyright ©2020 Collin U. Rapp. This repository is released under the MIT license.