/reddit-anti-gif-bot

A Reddit bot providing an mp4 link/mirror for gif submissions
  1. JavaScript 99.9%
  2. Shell 0.1%
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Latest commit 91bf69f May 22, 2017 @wasdennnoch Parse baseUrl instead of raw string, fix gfycat links not including w… 
…ebm size, minor fixes
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README.md Update readme Apr 26, 2017
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README.md

reddit-anti-gif-bot

The source of u/anti-gif-bot, a bot which provides an mp4 link/mirror for gif submissions.

Why?

As we all know gifs are a very old technique to save animated images of cute cats and share them with the world. These images have been bringing joy to - ah whatever, you all know what gifs are.

And as you might (should) also know gifs are HUGE. A 15 seconds long 720p video with 25fps for example takes up 160MB as a gif! For comparison, an mp4 version of the same video only takes up 12.5MB. A webm even only 1.8MB. As you see there is a HUGE difference in file size. For the sake of us all and our data caps (and mobile users) please always submit links to mp4 versions whenever possible.

Unfortunately not all gif hosters make it as easy to simply copy a link to an mp4 version. This is where this bot comes into play; it regulary looks through all new submissions and if the submission directly links a gif the bot comments with a link to an mp4 version. Many popular hosters already host mp4s themselves but if they don't provide alternative versions this bot uploads the gif to gfycat which then converts it to an mp4.

This not only helps mobile users but in general users on monitored networks or even people like me who don't have fast enough internet to download the full 160MB during the 15 seconds of playing. Don't only think of yourself please, there are people out there who don't have a gigabit connection.

No webm?

No, no webm. I don't download and convert the gifs but instead link to the mp4 versions already offered by the same hoster. The only website that hosts webms is gfycat but I don't want to upload every singe gif there or download, convert and upload them myself.

How?

Now some technical stuff. This bot is written in JavaScript and runs on Node.js. It uses the library snoowrap for every interaction with Reddit and the official gfycat-sdk to upload to gfycat. Every 15 seconds the bot fetches /r/all/new to get the newest submissions and filters all gif submissions. If the gif domain is known for providing an mp4 version the gif url gets converted to an mp4 link, otherwise a request to gfycat is made containing the gif url. After an mp4 link is generated (or gfycat is done converting the gif) a reply containing that link gets posted. That's it basically. There are a few more things such as a domain blacklist (the gifv-bot already covers gifs from imgur) and an internal stats counter that keeps track of the amount of submissions the bot scraped, the amount of gifs, domains that host gifs etc. Maybe I'll eventually create a website where I make these stats available. Until then I'll keep them private (well, I accidentally commited a dev version once but whatever, it's no secret) to enhance the bot and for my own curiosity.

And I?

If you find any bugs or want to submit an enhancement feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request and I'll look into it!