When the MTA announced discontinuing their live subway alerts due to Twitter's new excessive pricing policy, I took it as an opportunity to set up @mtaupdates.
I got carried away creating #mastodon#bots to fill in the missed presence of our municipal and provincial services which still post to Twitter like it's 2009, but aren't on the #fediverse.
After 5, I decided to make a quick tool to rapidly spin up bots based on a template and create a systemd service/timer to run it.
I wrote a little tutorial to go along with the code, in case anyone else is looking for a speedy way to generate basic bots quickly w/ PHP.
While AI-generated trash content in combination with bot chit-chat poses a challenge to all kinds of platforms and search engines, one major social media network has already been hit particularly hard: Twitter/X.
Have you ever noticed an account on here labelled "Automated" or "Bot"?
It means the account is a bot, operating automatically without a human doing the posting.
This might sound odd, but there are many useful and entertaining #bots, for example posting sports results or weather bulletins or public domain art. Other bots run interactive games of chess or D&D campaigns or text adventures.
Heads up other #mastodon instance admins, the any dot pink #spam#bots have started up again. We've just closed regos here until they pull their heads back in.
🐻 @bearcam: videos from Katmai National Park in Alaska, frequently featuring bears
🐠 @TropicalReefAquarium: a view from inside of a tropical reef aquarium in Long Beach, California
I can't attend #DjangoCon in person this year, but I registered for the online sprint! I love the idea of Contribution Sprints, as opposed to Development Sprints.
I'm making up new term: rate-limit anxiety (for APIs)
Context:
When CPython GitHub bots were still using personal access token, we were rate-limited to 5,000 requests per hour.
Now that both miss-islington and bedevere are GitHub Apps and accessing APIs using installation access token, the rate limit is increased, based on the number of users on the GitHub org , and capped at 12,500 requests per hour, relieving our rate-limit anxiety 😌
Hmm, it appears the #NWS#bots I have here that clone #Twitter are finally dead, with the switch for the birdsite to require login to view tweets. There is an extensive list of alternative weather bots that @lckrohjr and myself have running (the IEMBOT). I am going to swap the bots to pull weather stories/etc., but will be some time. BIGGER ISSUE: NWS TORNADO BOT WILL NOT RUN.
Kbin Pornbot alert - looks like a number of bot accounts have taken up residence on kbin and are spamming /m/random with porn
Looks like we've had a wave of porn bots hit recently. Screenshot is a sampling of what's popping up on my threads feed when sorted by new....
Some updates for BotIt: I have it running indefinitely on DigitalOcean + other things. (github.com)
Hello to the 2 users reading this! I've noticed some people using the bot already!...