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where is an OK place to experiment with bots? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by maengd@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I used code from a github repo to make a lemmy repost bot from a reddit sub.

I tested it out, it seemed OK. So I let it run over night.

When I got back I found out it had been posting the same thing over and over again every few minutes. The account was banned for spam. But in the meantime it was very annoying to people. Also, there are a bunch of posts that can't be removed because it's impossible to remove federated stuff.

Is there a responsible way to test this stuff?

I don't want to make spam, be annoying, etc. I feel bad about the spam bot.

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[–] grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As an old programmer, always build in checks for your systems. Keep a cache of posted articles and check it before posting so you know you haven't posted this one yet.

When you let something run overnight, that's going to go south somehow. If running overnight for the first time, throttle it to one post per hour. And not the same post. I'm the morning you check if it successfully posted a new article once per hour. Next let it post a little more frequently. Ease into your desired frequency once you have figured out all your edge cases and scale issues.

And so forth.

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also, don't let it run against the live system the first time. Implement a "dry run" option which doesn't post to Lemmy, but writes to a file or something similar. This way you can make sure nothing goes wrong in the parts aside from the Lemmy integration.

[–] grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I was going to add this but figured I had already given too many points. This is the way, though.

[–] oleorun@lemmy.fan 5 points 1 year ago

This is great advice, and to the OP, don't feel bad. You're really not an IT person of any caliber until you have experienced when I like to call the "Production Incident Experience", or PIE. IT work is a job with unforseen consequences and hurdles, and we've all run into them at one point or another.

This being a learning experience, do what we've all done and learn from it. Now you can set up logging, whatif, sandbox instance, whatever you have to do.

You're on the road to becoming a good programmer - just learn from your mistakes, do your research on best practices, ask intelligent questions, and in no time at all you'll be writing one of these posts yourself.