What bots would you like to see?

Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 23 points – 1 years ago

I'm thinking of looking at the Lemmy api and that's best done when you have some actual problem to solve!

So, is there any bot that you'd like to see?

Some recollections from Reddit:

A bot that links the top posts of all time for a community. Gives a good sense of the community's greatest hits when referenced in discussions.

A bot that converts imperial to metric units or vice versa. Some people do find this one annoying, but as a metric user, this one helps me understand miles and pounds, etc.

A bot that summarises or pulls the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article.

The metric <-> imperial seems like something I'd have fun doing!

In a similar vein, a bot that links to a timezone converter.

One that inserts a comment randomly about jumper cables or the lochness monster

Maybe the remindme bot

Was thinking about that but it's often considered annoying, so I thought I'd ask first.

I liked the summarize bot. That one was actually contributing to conversations.

Yeah, that one was definitely nice!

I would rather have Lemmy get the ability to follow a comment or post. That's mostly what it had been used for.

It’s funny you mention that. My friend’s teenage son had made a bot for Reddit years ago when it was a new thing while he was in a summer program for computer science. The bot would post theater times for latest movie releases in local subreddits and it was considered a helpful bot by most. I got used to relying on it quite a bit - until one time I took the family to what I thought was a Lego movie, but we ended up seeing Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! My father had came with two of my 2nd cousins and he was disturbed to say the least. When we got home, my dad was so upset that he beat me unmercifully with a set of jumper cables to teach me a lesson - you shouldn’t expose the family to such nonsense he said. Needless to say I will never rely on online bots for movie times with my family again.

Didn't see this one coming. Good job sir

undefined> When we got home, my dad was so upset that he beat me unmercifully with a set of jumper cables to teach me a lesson - you shouldn’t expose the family to such nonsense he said. Needless to say I will never rely on online bots for movie times with my family again.

LMAO you bastard!

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AutoModbot, autotldr, remindme, top posts And lemmy URL fixer (transform regular lemmy link to federated one e.g. https://lemmy.world/c/memes to !memes@lemmy.world).

Lemmy URL fixer is done! Example: https://lemmings.world/c/lemmings_world_instance

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !lemmings_world_instance@lemmings.world

Well done! Much needed. How it summon itself?

Just write the URL and it should come. It does have to know about your community, though, not sure how exactly that works.

Fyi this is calling out links made with the official autocomplete. I've blocked it but does that stop it from replying to me or just stop me from seeing the replies?

It stops it from replying to you. And the official autocomplete is weird, it produces wrong links and then replaces them on the fly with the correct ones.

Yeah I'm aware not all the app interfaces etc have caught up with the proper links yet. So I'll just keep including the local ones manually for now to include the most people. Anyway cheers, I post a lot of links so as long as it's not hassling me with false positives 😄

I'm currently working on handling that weirdness the UI does to ignore the default links, will let you know when it's updated.

It has been fixed!

Quick work! 👏

Those are good ideas!

@autotldr@lemmings.world is live now!

Is it possible to make it comment on a specific post? Mention in does nothing

It probably doesn't know about the community, or it doesn't have support for the site. Can you link me to the post (either here, or in PM, it's up to you).

Edit: Probably found it, it doesn't have any support for news.sky.com, shall I add it?

Thanks for your answer. idk about adding it, the article sounded interesting but idk how relayable this news site is and how much work it takes. I guess it's up to you :)

Added it along with the ability to respond to mentions. Once it's deployed, it should respond to your mention (hopefully, it was kinda huge overhaul of the code).

Worked on my mention :)

Just throwing out an idea, feel free to ignore it XD

I think that if one would write a quick "how to write a site handler" with a built-in template (like I've seen used), I'm sure many will contribute and send PRs for their favorite sites. If you're interested of course. I don't mind volunteer for doing the writeup either.

If you feel up to it, I'll gladly accept it! I'm planning on doing it myself, but I'm not sure when I'll have the time.

How to make a site handler:

Go to your favorite news site (for example: euronews.com)
Go to a random article
Go to the blank space inside of the actual article (Not the summary that's usually on top)
Right click on that spot and go to inspect

In our example:

Then, look at the div HTML element it selected for you, and try to go up to the Parent div element as long as when you select it, only the body of the article get mark. In our example, when I did the inspect step, I got this div element marked:

But, as I went up the tree like the last step said, I found this div:

You might think to go even upper like this:

But as you can see, the browser highlighted parts that aren't the body of the article itself. So...don't.

Now that we got the correct div, we'll fill the siteHandler template like this

Then,

Save that template as SiteHandler.php (in our example, EuronewsSiteHandler.php )
Send PR to the Official AutoTldr repo with the file you just created.
DONE

Edit it as you wish, or let me know if you need me to do so. No need for credit obviously, just helping improve this amazing tool is enough :)

Note: I had to use that codefile website because something went wrong with the code markdown, but I guess you can skip it once you put it on github.

Thank you very much! I've saved the comment and when I have time I'll include it in the repository's readme.

NP, but I'd advise you to save it somewhere else as a whole as I don't know for how long that code sharing website host the templates. Although you can easily rewrite this part.

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I think I can do it tomorrow, hopefully it won't slip my mind

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None. None of them.

My dumbass non-coder self would kill to have a bot that autoposts a thread every 12am daily. It's hard to stay up that late just to make the daily thread, lmao.

Or maybe there is one already?

Not sure if there's one, but it doesn't seem hard at all.

Hi there! I made an app that allows you to schedule posts: https://schedule.lemmings.world

Not a bot, but still should help a bit. You can also pin/unpin a post using the scheduler.

Maybe a "good bod", "bad bot" detection bot? I imagine a lot of people won't actually report a problem on GitHub all time (some bots don't even leave their source code in their comment), so this way you get a way to reports issues+get an example, or to see when it works fine.