Weekend Project: Reddit AMA Bot

The Inspiration

Reddit user /u/Insanimate made this hotsauce packet painting and posted it on /r/pics. The president of TacoBell-or whoever runs their social media accounts-then showed up in the post and asked how they could buy one.

Nobody noticed. The painting was posted over a year ago, yet the president's comment went unrecognized and unseen at only 13 points before it wound up on /r/bestof last week.

This is a scenario I've seen play out all over reddit whenever a 'celebrity' reddit user makes a comment. Nobody knows, or is skeptical about the veracity of a user's identity.

So to help ameliorate this problem I made a reddit bot that searches through a user's history, and returns a table of the user's AMA posts. If there are no such posts, then nothing happens.

The Code

import praw
import re
import OAuth2Util
import pymongo
import datetime
import time

user_agent = 'AMA identifier: v0.2 (by /u/Molag_balls)'
r = praw.Reddit(user_agent)
o = OAuth2Util.OAuth2Util(r, configfile="oauthconfig.ini")
o.refresh(force=True)

#Connect to mongodb

try:
    conn = pymongo.MongoClient()
    print "Connected successfully!"
except pymongo.errors.ConnectionFailure, e:
    print "Could not connect to MongoDB: %s" % e

db = conn.IdentityBot
collection = db.CommentIDs


def in_database(comment_id): #Is the entry in the database already?

    if collection.find({"comment_id": comment_id}).count() > 0:
        return True
    else:
        return False

def already_done_to_db(already_done):
    for id in already_done:
        collection.update_one(
            {"comment_id": id},
            {
                 "$set": 
                     {
                         "collected_at": datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%s") 
                     }
            },
            upsert=True
        )


#Loop 'forever'

while True:

    #Get all comments in subreddit(s) of interest

    print "Getting comments..."
    all_comments = r.get_comments('bottesting', limit=None)
    already_done = []

    print "Searching through comments..."
    #Look through every comment

    for comment in all_comments:
    #If the comment starts with "!identify, and it's not in the database already"

        if comment.body.lower().startswith('!identify') and not in_database(comment.id):
 
    #If no username is present, use the author of the parent comment

    if comment.body.lower() == "!identify":
        parent_comment = r.get_info(thing_id=comment.parent_id)
        parent = r.get_redditor(parent_comment.author)
 
 #Else use the username provided

    elif re.search(r'/u/([A-Za-z0-9_-]*)', comment.body):
        parent = r.get_redditor(re.search(r'/u/([A-Za-z0-9_-]*)', comment.body).group(1))
 
 #Get all of the submissions made by user in question

    parent_submissions = parent.get_submitted('new', 'all', limit=None)
    amas_found = []
    for submission in parent_submissions:
 #Regex expression finds possible AMA posts, no matter the subreddit.

    if re.search(r'((?:i am|iam|iama|we are) .* (:?ama|amaa|ask me almost anything|aua|ausa|ask us anything|ask me anything).*)', str(submission.title.encode('utf-8', 'ignore')).lower()):
 #amas_found will be a list of tuples containing the title, permalink, and number of comments in the AMA in question

        amas_found.append((submission.title.encode('utf-8', 'ignore'), submission.permalink, submission.num_comments))
 
 #Only if we've actually found any AMAs will we do anything

    if amas_found:
        comment_table_header = "Title|Comments\n---|---\n"

 #Build the table for the comment

        comment_table = comment_table_header
        for ama in amas_found:
            title = ama[0]
            if len(title) > 75:
                title = title[:72] + "..."
            link = ama[1]
            n_comments = ama[2]
            comments_string = str(n_comments)+" Comments"
            comments_link = "["+comments_string+"]"+"("+link.encode('utf-8', 'ignore')+")"
            comment_table = comment_table + title + '|' + comments_link + '\n'

 #Build the body of the comment. Needs prettifying

        body = "User /u/"+str(parent.name) +" has posted the following AMAs:\n\n" + comment_table + "\n\n^(I'm just a bot made by /u/Molag_balls, If I've gotten something wrong, let him know)"
 
 #We don't want the script to break if we get a rate limit

        print 'Commenting...'
        try:
            comment.reply(body)
            already_done.append(comment.id)
        except Exception, e:
            print e
            continue


    already_done_to_db(already_done)
    already_done = []
    print "Sleeping for 5 minutes"
    time.sleep(180)

The code above is commented, so I won't go through it line by line, but in broad strokes:

1) The script grabs all the most recent comments in a subreddit, and checks to see if they begin with "!identify", which I have chosen as my "summoning" phrase.

2) The script checks a MongoDB database to see whether or not we've handled this comment before. If not, it continues.

3) Then, if the comment starts with "!identify" the script will either: Use the parent comment's author and will check for their AMAs, or if a user is specified, then it will check for their AMAs

4) If any AMAs are found some sparse information is saved about them (Permalink, title, number of comments) and is formatted into a reddit table.

5) The bot comments, adds the summoning comment IDs to the Mongo database, and sleeps for 5 minutes (or however long you want).

The output looks a little something like this:

The code is pretty ugly, but it works okay from what I've seen and I did this on a lark, so I'm not terribly concerned. Now I have to figure out how to spread the word about the summoning phrase, so I can set it loose in the wild and see if people actually find it useful and so I can improve it if need be.

Next Steps

1) Set this up to run continuously on an unused computer in my house, because I'm too cheap and lazy to find and set up a host online.

2) Make it so it deletes comments with -1 comment karma, so the reddit hivemind won't get angry.

3) Make more reddit bots because this was fun.