A language learners’ forum

mvillalba wrote:1) How do you manage it? There doesn't seem to be any admin pages or anything of that nature in the code. Raw SQL queries and log files?

Yes. I load up the various languages and things with a straightforward SQL script. If you look at the mysql_structure.sql script you can see the majority of insert statements. There are some other inserts which are doing manually to install the API secret keys, etc.

mvillalba wrote:2) I read somewhere on the SuperChallenge thread the bot is not able to send twits and that's why its Twitter feed looks empty. Is that the case? I ask because the bot has all sorts of reply-to-twit-type calls in the code as part of its message handling and should be generating visible content.

This used to work, however Twitter made changes to the API and we've not modified the code to use the new calls to send messages. I think they made the changes last year to cut down on the amount of spam tweets that were being sent out. The bot can send tweets, but the function calls to do this would need to be modified to pass the new arguments.

mvillalba wrote:About your current hosting arrangements. Could you tell me a bit more about how the DB is hosted, specifically? Is it a standard RDS MySQL instance (i.e. not a custom EC2 instance persisting to an EBS volume and managed by Docker)? And is it actually MySQL (i.e. not MariaDB)?

The SC bot has the ability to host it's own DB inside of the Docker instance, but we don't use that. We use MySQL (not MariaDB) RDS instance. Although one of the objectives was to allow it to use PostgreSQL DB as well but another thing I haven't had time to implement.

BTW, thanks for the interest. We can always use more programmers to beef up the system. Everything here is done on an all volunteer basis, so any assistance is gratefully received.

Bluepaint wrote:Mvillalba if you are serious about following through then I can create an announcement asking people to comment with what they'd like or expect from a bot and anything else you'd want their feedback on.

Yes, I'm serious. And that'd be quite helpful. Basically, I'd like to know what features people would like and how they relate to or differ from what the former 6WC bot did and the existing SC bot does.

I'm thinking all challenges are pretty similar from the perspective of what a bot does (take registrations, progress reports, etc.) and with a bit of input it could be flexible enough that people could just run new ideas on it without me having to change the code and without you having to provision new servers.

rdearman wrote:This used to work, however Twitter made changes to the API and we've not modified the code to use the new calls to send messages. I think they made the changes last year to cut down on the amount of spam tweets that were being sent out. The bot can send tweets, but the function calls to do this would need to be modified to pass the new arguments.

The bot's code for replyTweet() inside update.php looks like it should work (it hits the right endpoint and passes the right parameters). Maybe the bot's account is banned from tweeting? Twitter did go a bit crazy with their no spam thing, even though this is perfectly legitimate usage. Have you tried doing a manual login and just tweeting anything? You might be asked for phone verification or similar.

rdearman wrote:BTW, thanks for the interest. We can always use more programmers to beef up the system. Everything here is done on an all volunteer basis, so any assistance is gratefully received.

Happy to help

Since this has turned into a thread about both bots, can we bring back the ability to sort SC participants based on total count (and/or display the count somewhere)? The code already exists but I have no idea how to find it or whether it's compatible with the current version.