Long story short, I tried to get a voat API key but they don't seem to be available so yesterday I hacked my own wrapper together for a voat bot that watches new posts on a subverse, scrapes links from the OP, uses google to search the subverse for posts that contain that link and posts a comment with link to that post if its found. I will be running it manually till I feel comfortable to let it loose to run on its own.
https://voat.co/v/test/1674303
https://voat.co/user/PizzagateBot/comments
I still need to normalize the link output better and I need to put in some error handling and I'm sure there will be some edge case stuff that will break it and need to be fixed. In any case, If you have any feedback on how to improve it or if you find a bad link, something wrong, or even an idea for other type of benevolent bots, let me know.
If you click one of the links be sure to upvoat the bot account.
Cheers!
view the rest of the comments →
Z11Mama ago
I wish I understood this better. It sounds very helpful. It would be nice to see a subverse? where we could learn more about features like this as well as how to investigate. There are so many simple things we amateurs are clueless on. Thanks for your work on this. It is appreciated.
throwaway89209834 ago
Here is an example post that it scanned: https://voat.co/v/pizzagate/1675669
It found this link: http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/scalia-was-a-pedophile-claims-victim/
It then does the equivalent of this type of google search
It then makes a comment with the titles of those posts and turns them into links like this - https://voat.co/v/pizzagate/1675669/8209301 .
The idea is to try and link otherwise fragmented information together.
Google isn't all that great when it comes to really specific searches, will sometimes ignore quoted strings, and certain special characters, I get 4 searches manually and my bot finds only 3, but Google API is the easiest API to work with so it is what it is for now.
Z11Mama ago
This is wonderful. Now...if I want to research a subject, how do I do that, using this method?
throwaway89209834 ago
It is just using google to isolate the search to the pizzagate subverse http://voat.co/v/pizzagate
You can isolate your google search to any site, so long as it is being crawled by google, and its subpages. So, if I want to search all of /v/pizzagate for the term "Secret Pizza" I would enter this as a phrase into google search
Or if I only want results from reddit.com
Or say I want to only see pages that are from 1990 to Sept 2016 (have to use Julian date range - http://www.onlineconversion.com/julian_date.htm )
Here is a list of operators that you can use in your google searches https://bynd.com/news-ideas/google-advanced-search-comprehensive-list-google-search-operators/