Bitcointalk Campaign Manager

General information

NOTE, THE UTILITY IS STILL VERY MUCH A WORK IN PROGRESS AND USERS SHOULD NOT RELY ON IT TO BE BUG-FREE

The Bitcointalk Campaign Manager is a Python utility developed to aid campaign managers on Bitcointalk to do their jobs more efficiently.

When managing campaigns, a lot of time is spent keeping track of user's post, activity and merit at the start and end of the campaign round. This utility will do that automatically by fetching data from Bitcointalk when starting a new round and then again when round is ended. It will also calculate the difference between end and the start.

In its present form, the utility will save campaign and round information into their corresponding folders in JSON format. Round data can be exported into CSV.

Donations

Donations are always welcome: bc1p6yuzqkl5csrjgwqtzlws38css8ruasjdz6pt37drg40778e9rp0qjyku8h

Usage

Make sure you have required packages installed:

OPTIONALLY Start a new virtual environment:

(python3 -m venv .venv)

(source .venv/bin/activate)

Install prerequisites:

pip install bs4 scrapy

The main entry point to the program is the main.py file.

Simple help commands are available via

python3 main.py --help or python3 main.py SUBCOMMAND --help

Run tests via (not many test cases yet but more should be added later...):

python3 -m unittest -v

The supported subcommands are main.py campaign and main.py round

Bitcointalk user UID is an integer round by taking a look at profile link of an user, for example UID of satoshi is 3: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3

Add new campaigns by:

python3 main.py campaign add CAMPAIGN_NAME

Add participants to a campaign by:

python3 main.py campaign add_participant [--payment_address ADDRESS] CAMPAIGN_NAME BITCOINTALK_UID

Here, --payment_address, is an optional parameter to add a crypto address where participant will be paid. The address will be visible in the CSV also for less manual filling.

Add a payment address to an existing campaign participant:

python3 main.py campaign add_payment_address CAMPAIGN_NAME BITCOINTALK_UID PAYMENT_ADDRESS

Remove participants:

python3 main.py campaign remove_participant CAMPAIGN_NAME BITCOINTALK_UID

Start a new round:

python3 main.py round add CAMPAIGN_NAME ROUND_NUMBER

where ROUND_NUMBER can be any integer, for example start at 1 and then next add round 2 etc.

This will fetch current post count etc. for each user currently added into the campaign.

Flag --round_start is supported. It can be supplied as seconds from epoch. Otherwise, current time is used:

python3 main.py round add CAMPAIGN_NAME ROUND_NUMBER --round_start SECONDS_SINCE_EPOCH

If this flag is used, the starting post count, activity and merit will be unknown.

Add a new participant to an ongoing round:

python3 main.py round add_participant [--payment_address ADDRESS] CAMPAIGN_NAME ROUND_NUMBER BITCOINTALK_UID

Here, --payment_address, is an optional parameter to add a crypto address where participant will be paid. The address will be visible in the CSV also for less manual filling.

Add a payment address to an existing round participant:

python3 main.py round add_payment_address CAMPAIGN_NAME ROUND_NUMBER BITCOINTALK_UID PAYMENT_ADDRESS

End round:

python3 main.py round end CAMPAIGN_NAME ROUND_NUMBER

This will fetch post scount etc. for each user that was in the campaign at the start of the round and update the information and count difference to start.

Save round information to CSV (can be done at start of round as well as end of round):

python3 main.py round round_to_csv CAMPAIGN_NAME ROUND_NUMBER

Where information is saved

By default, information is saved into a new directory named campaigns in the directory where the program is ran.

In the campaigns folder is a metadata.json file where campaign information such as current round and participants are stored.

For each round a new directory is created and the name of the directory is the round number. Additionally, in this folder there will be a round.json file containing current information of the round as well as a round.csv file if the round_to_csv command was used. The CSV is currently written over for each time the command is used.

To summarize,

For campaign information check campaigns/metadata.json

For round information check campaigns/ROUND_NUMBER/round.json or round.csv

Notes

As mentioned before, the program is a work in progress and much more functionality could be added.

Things I have planned:

• Posts users have made in a round will be fetched into a readable format for easy evaluation.
• View current participants using a command (currently need to check the metadata.json file)