6WC Twitter Bot

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Xenops
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6WC Twitter Bot

Postby Xenops » Mon Jul 22, 2019 5:30 pm

Hello, I was wondering if there is any news about the 6WC Twitter bot? Is it still out of commission? Is there any hope of its return? :cry:

When contemplating fixing it myself, I realized that I have a much better idea of how to start learning Arabic, or just about any language, than how to write a bot. :? Or any programming, really.

Thanks for your time,

Xenops
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Re: 6WC Twitter Bot

Postby mvillalba » Mon Jul 22, 2019 5:53 pm

I'm a developer. How does it all work? Is the bot hosted by Language-Learners.org directly, or...? I could take a look at the problem if you could point me in the right direction.
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Re: 6WC Twitter Bot

Postby Xenops » Tue Jul 23, 2019 3:54 am

mvillalba wrote:I'm a developer. How does it all work? Is the bot hosted by Language-Learners.org directly, or...? I could take a look at the problem if you could point me in the right direction.


Welcome to the forum, mvillalba! I hope you enjoy it here. :D

This is the link they gave me earlier: perhaps you could make sense of it?

https://github.com/language-learners/superchallengebot
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Re: 6WC Twitter Bot

Postby mvillalba » Tue Jul 23, 2019 4:42 am

Xenops wrote:Welcome to the forum, mvillalba! I hope you enjoy it here. :D

Thank you, I reckon I will :)

Xenops wrote:This is the link they gave me earlier: perhaps you could make sense of it?

https://github.com/language-learners/superchallengebot

There are no critical issues filed against it or anything. Who gave you the link to that repo? rdearman?

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Re: 6WC Twitter Bot

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Jul 23, 2019 8:32 am

That’s the super challenge bot, not the 6WC bot. The super challenge bot is working and is run by this forum. The 6WC bot is run by Judith Meyer of Learnlangs. I think Rdearman was saying that you could make a new bot for a new 6WC since Judith doesn’t seem interested anymore. The link to the super challenge bot was just to show you how a bot works. Someone else on the forum was thinking of making a new challenge similar to the 6WC, but I don’t know what happened with that.
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Re: 6WC Twitter Bot

Postby mvillalba » Tue Jul 23, 2019 4:11 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:That’s the super challenge bot, not the 6WC bot. The super challenge bot is working and is run by this forum. The 6WC bot is run by Judith Meyer of Learnlangs. I think Rdearman was saying that you could make a new bot for a new 6WC since Judith doesn’t seem interested anymore. The link to the super challenge bot was just to show you how a bot works. Someone else on the forum was thinking of making a new challenge similar to the 6WC, but I don’t know what happened with that.


Ah, that clarifies things a tad.

Well, I need some new toy projects to put on my portfolio and I'd love to build something that's actually going to be used. So if you guys know what you need/want, I'd be happy to spend a coupe weekends adapting one of the existing bots / building a new one. Could probably even host it.
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Re: 6WC Twitter Bot

Postby Bluepaint » Tue Jul 23, 2019 4:19 pm

mvillalba wrote:
Well, I need some new toy projects to put on my portfolio and I'd love to build something that's actually going to be used. So if you guys know what you need/want, I'd be happy to spend a coupe weekends adapting one of the existing bots / building a new one. Could probably even host it.


Hey, if you PM Emk or Rdearman they can probably give you directions.
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Re: 6WC Twitter Bot

Postby rdearman » Tue Jul 23, 2019 6:27 pm

Thought I would post here rather than a PM in case other people are interested. The link to the Github page is indeed the source code for the current SuperChallenge bot. It uses the Twitter API and you can download the source code from github for the bot. After you have the bot you'd need to set up a twitter API account and then you can start your own bot and testing it. The 6WC bot was written with different code so the interface and commands were slightly different. (I'm sure someone here could give you a list of commands and what it did)

In addition, we're always looking for improvement of the SuperChallenge bot. For example, it doesn't currently play well with 3 letter ISO codes or for language family groups. There are some suggestions for improvements on the github page for the SC bot. One of the things we thought about was trying to make the bot more generic so you could simply put things into the DB for configuration and remove some hard-coded stuff. For example the list of commands it will respond to is hard-coded, it would be nice if it loaded commands from the DB. So generic bot could be simply reconfigured to employ the 6WC commands and display results.

One thing we did do was to make a "Docker" out of the SC bot so that it would be easier to host. All of our forum and the current SC bot are all docker instances on AWS servers. This should make it easier for developers to run an instance on their machine with Docker.

It has some known issues, like for example it doesn't really know how to go back and collect old tweets if the tweet collection daemon is stopped or interrupted. This means people have to go back and re-tweet scores which is frustrating. It would be nice if it could match the last posted update with tweet, and process all tweets after that time. To be fair this is a rare occurrence but it does happen.

As far as hosting goes, that isn't a problem. If you did a new 6WC bot, then we could host it on our AWS platform. But again we'd turn it into a Docker to ease changes. We've got some scripted stuff in the AWS backend which allows us to deploy code by grabbing a copy from git hub and building, configuring and testing automatically. (Super smart EMK stuff, nothing to do with me!)

The SC bot is written in PHP and uses MySQL as the DB.
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Re: 6WC Twitter Bot

Postby mvillalba » Wed Jul 24, 2019 6:53 pm

rdearman wrote:Thought I would post here rather than a PM in case other people are interested. The link to the Github page is indeed the source code for the current SuperChallenge bot. It uses the Twitter API and you can download the source code from github for the bot. After you have the bot you'd need to set up a twitter API account and then you can start your own bot and testing it. The 6WC bot was written with different code so the interface and commands were slightly different. (I'm sure someone here could give you a list of commands and what it did)

In addition, we're always looking for improvement of the SuperChallenge bot. For example, it doesn't currently play well with 3 letter ISO codes or for language family groups. There are some suggestions for improvements on the github page for the SC bot. One of the things we thought about was trying to make the bot more generic so you could simply put things into the DB for configuration and remove some hard-coded stuff. For example the list of commands it will respond to is hard-coded, it would be nice if it loaded commands from the DB. So generic bot could be simply reconfigured to employ the 6WC commands and display results.

One thing we did do was to make a "Docker" out of the SC bot so that it would be easier to host. All of our forum and the current SC bot are all docker instances on AWS servers. This should make it easier for developers to run an instance on their machine with Docker.

It has some known issues, like for example it doesn't really know how to go back and collect old tweets if the tweet collection daemon is stopped or interrupted. This means people have to go back and re-tweet scores which is frustrating. It would be nice if it could match the last posted update with tweet, and process all tweets after that time. To be fair this is a rare occurrence but it does happen.

As far as hosting goes, that isn't a problem. If you did a new 6WC bot, then we could host it on our AWS platform. But again we'd turn it into a Docker to ease changes. We've got some scripted stuff in the AWS backend which allows us to deploy code by grabbing a copy from git hub and building, configuring and testing automatically. (Super smart EMK stuff, nothing to do with me!)

The SC bot is written in PHP and uses MySQL as the DB.


Thank you for taking the time to reply directly. I'll look into writing another bot most likely, after looking over the code for the SC bot. I looked around the forum and found someone talking about writing a bot for a new 3 week challenge, but then the OP stopped posting days after starting the thread, and that was back in March. I've asked about the status of that; maybe there is no need for new bot code.

As for the SC bot itself, I made a token contribution in the form of a pull request addressing something I noticed while reading the code. I've also got a couple questions about the bot in general:
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?
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.

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)?

---

Are there any 6WC participants reading this thread? I'd love to know what you'd expect/want from a new bot, and specially if you'd actually be interested in one.
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Re: 6WC Twitter Bot

Postby Bluepaint » Wed Jul 24, 2019 7:46 pm

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.
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