Due to a bug in the code, notifications for Posts are currently not working. I know the issue and will fix it tonight when I'm off work

I'm home recovering from a bachelor party I attended this weekend, but it's the second time I've taken time off work in the past month. What those vacations have in common, though, is that Redditcomber decided to crash on me while I didn't have particularly convenient internet access, causing an outage that lasted about a day each time.

Well, I'm tired of Murphy's Law biting me in the ass every time I decide to "trust" this app. There's too many people using it at this point for that to be acceptable. Now, y'all are exceptionally accommodating. I've received nothing but positive messages whenever people have had an issue with the service asking for help, and in those cases I'm happy to go out of my way to provide it.

But I think it'd be easier for everyone if "shit just worked". So I decided it was time to dive into a deployment management service like K8s or Docker. In this case, Docker because it's piss-easy to set up in comparison. GCP is a little bit of a hassle to set up with it, but overall it still makes my life way easier managing this thing, so here we are.

A little background on the app is that the comment scanner and post scanner are actually two different services that actually share a lot of logic. They live in the same repo, and use the same libraries, but they have different entry points and slightly different scanning logic.

The popular pattern seems to be a Dockerfile for each app startup process, which is straightforward enough; just copy the files to the relevant workspace, build, and run the app.

Then just add an entry for each into our docker-compose.yml file and then docker-compose up becomes a quick and easy startup command for both. The nice part though is a little line in the config; restart: "unless-stopped", which restarts the app should it ever crash for some reason.

So lastly, log into the GCP VM I have provisioned for this project, make sure docker tools are installed and the daemon is running, and start the app. Redditcomber should now run indefinitely and be fault tolerant.

And as a bonus, whenever I update the app now, I can simply clone the repo and re run docker-compose up -d and it will replace the old running instance. Less downtime when making development changes!

Future plans will be to integrate it with GCP's Cloud Build / Cloud Deploy products, but that's a todo item for another time.

And lastly, here's the Patreon for Redditcomber in case you're interested in supporting this project. Supporters get my eternal gratitude, as well as a couple extra features: https://www.patreon.com/rgood

With Private Messages going away, some people have been asking what's going to happen to Redditcomber and I finally have an update on that front

TL;DR: Redditcomber isn't going anywhere, but the notifications are going to show up in Chat instead. For details, read on.

Reddit has always turned a little bit of a blind eye to how I use the api because of the nature of the service. A side-effect of the design, however, has been to have multiple accounts delivering notifications to users, all of which dominate the top-10 list of accounts that send the most private messages.

Those accounts are listed below:

• u/feedcomber-p1

• u/feedcomber-p2

• u/feedcomber-p3

• u/feedcomber-p4

• u/feedcomber-c1

• u/feedcomber-c2

• u/feedcomber-c3 (currently borked)

• u/feedcomber-c4 (currently borked)

• u/feedcomber-c5

• u/feedcomber-c6

Well, I've recently added 3 more;

• u/feedcomber-c7

• u/feedcomber-c8

• u/feedcomber-c9

I mention this because, as Redditcomber transitions to chat messages, each of these accounts results in a unique chat thread, which can look a little spammy, so that's something to keep in mind going forward

Chat notifications themselves look mostly the same given the UI limitations of the chat window

If you have Reddit set up to get email notifications for private messages, as far as I can tell, that just doesn't work anymore, so there's not much I can do about that beyond supporting sending emails directly, but I'm not prepared to devote dev time to that at the moment

So that's going to be the state of Redditcomber going forward once the change goes live. As much as I'm sure we're all grumbling over the change in how Reddit works, I do appreciate the admins that worked with me to make sure Redditcomber continues to function. They do, at the very least, seem to understand the value it provides to its users and want to preserve that functionality. They could've easily decided not to support the migration at all, or shut it down during the great API debacle, but instead they dedicated time and effort to making sure it still works and I think that's worth acknowledging

That's all I got for you for now, thanks for using Redditcomber and I hope my dumb little side-project has been as useful to you as it has been for me

There's a new version of Redditcomber now available for general use at: https://beta.redditcomber.com

Please give it a test-drive and let me know how it goes

Edit: In case the website seems broken to you, please try forcing a refresh of your browser's DNS cache. On Chrome, you can do that here: chrome://net-internals/#dns

Moving the application to a new server, so there might be some downtime while the the domain updates and I stand the services back up

Edit: Migration complete

I've addressed the issue with post notifications. It had to do with recovering when Reddit's public api was unavailable. It should recover more gracefully now

I just need to run an update on the computer it runs on before I go on vacation for a week

If you noticed and came here checking why, comment below and I'll gild you or something idk

u/Sub_Mentions has been in disrepair for some time at this point after several years of running unmonitored. This hasn't been due to the public api changes but more so my neglect. It's a very old project and one I'm not prepared to continue maintaining at this point. If Reddit's first-party Dev Platform ends up supporting it though, I'll probably build something on there in the future to replace it

Redditcomber will NOT be going away. You can still find and use it here: https://redditcomber.com

I want to take a moment to highlight the differences between these two projects so it's clear what is or isn't going away, and why I made this choice

u/Sub_Mentions was always made for the purpose of being a moderator tool. Mods wanted to know when their subreddit was mentioned elsewhere on Reddit the same way that usernames worked. Because of its primary purpose as a mod tool, u/Sub_Mentions was designed to support sending notifications to modmail. If modteams didn't want these notifications but individual mods did, they could configure the notifications to be sent to their inbox instead.

In contrast, Redditcomber was always a tool for personal / individual use. If you have a topic or keyword that you were personally interested in finding usage of on Reddit, then you could enter it in Redditcomber and receive notifications. Redditcomber was designed to be a more generic, more powerful tool that was intended for a broader audience. Taking that tool and building in support for modmail messages would've been a lot of work for a very niche use-case, so I chose not to, especially since u/Sub_Mentions was functioning fine at the time.

Well, time passed and now I'm at the point of not really wanting to support two different projects with different tech-stacks doing similar things, so I've elected to stick with Redditcomber. Hopefully those of you that were previously using u/sub_mentions can either adapt it to suit your needs, or find another tool that can. As I mentioned, keep an eye out for stuff on Reddit's developer platform.

For those of you interested, I'll leave the links in the sidebar to u/Sub_Mention's source code up, so you can play with it yourselves but it will probably need a good bit of work to get running with the latest version of PRAW, and please do feel free to reach out and ask questions about anything related to the work I've done / am doing on any of the projects discussed here.

For those following the dev-posts of this bot, you're probably aware that this bot runs on the same server that I use to run redditcomber.com

Well, redditcomber is bork for now and I need to make some code-changes to prevent system abuse before I can start it back up. That's why the bot's been offline lately.

Service will be restored when I next have a free moment to resolve these issues.

Edit: Redditcomber is back online now as well.

I've been toiling away at this for awhile now, and I'm satisfied with how the frontend looks. It's at least done enough for it to go live, despite a few remaining bugs. So with that, I'm gonna mark it as done and move onto the comment scraper.

I did most of it as a side-project to test how feasible a distributed system was awhile back. So now I have to dig it up, brush off the dust, and hook it up to what I have, as well as fill in the missing pieces (which is actually sending the notifications).

Once that's done, the last step is data migration, which I've tasked /u/Drunken_Economist with. He's at least a little helpful... sometimes.

So I'll mark the numbers here:

• Frontend: 100%

• Comment Scraper: 50%

• Data Migration: Justin%

Cheers,
T1RG

Edit: The comment scraper wasn't too hard to set back up.

• Frontend: 100%

• Comment Scrapper: 95%

• Data Migration: Justin%

I'm a little apprehensive to post this, because I don't want to give people the wrong impression.

As of right now, the official RedditComber service is not online. HOWEVER, I have set up a temporary front-end that you guys can use to test it / get a feel for the differences between the two.

IMPORTANT: THIS IS A TEMPORARY DEMO. INFORMATION SAVED THERE WILL NOT PERSIST WHEN THE SITE GOES OFFICIALLY LIVE.

THE COMMENT SCRAPER IS A TEST VERSION. MESSAGES WILL NOT BE CONSISTENT.

This is exclusively for the purpose of familiarizing yourselves with the new interface.

https://redditcomber.com/

Thanks for bearing with me,
T1RG

Well, this has been a long-time coming, but Redditcomber V1 died today for various reasons. It was plagued by memory leaks, crashing, my occasional stupidity, and was so old, that it wasn't up to the standards of software engineering that I am now capable.

HOWEVER, this only means that the time-table for releasing a V2 has been sped up. I desperately hate the thought of https://redditcomber.com having any down-time, so I'll basically be devoting 100% of my free time towards making a sleeker, more-reliable version over the next few days.

Thanks for bearing with me during the transition.

Cheers,
T1RG

Progress update: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubNotifications/comments/avy165/redditcomber_v2_update/

It's been a long couple of days, but the new app is up, the comment scraper is running (on my computer for now, so I can baby-sit it), and the data has been migrated.

RedditComber is officially back online.

Thanks for being patient, and I hope you dig the new site.

https://redditcomber.com

Thanks everybody, and thank you very much to /u/Drunken_Economist for his continued development support.

Cheers,
T1RG

Hey, when I made the change I didn't post anything so I guess I will now.

I had a few requests to update the post format, so I've gone ahead and done that. Should look a tad cleaner / more compact. Also slightly more mobile friendly, based on the notifications I've received on my phone, so thanks to the people who've suggested the changes.

In the future I'd maybe like to consider letting people format their own messages, but that'd require a lot of consideration towards how that'd be configured or reconfigured. Just something to toss around in my head and see if anything rolls out.

So, I can't access /prefs/apps on my /u/Sub_Mentions account. I continuously get 500 server responses, so I can't access the client secret and client ID to start up the script.

Also, because it's xmas, I'm doubtful this will get resolved before New Years. :/

Happy holidays, and if you need any modifications to your subscriptions, please PM me directly. I'll have to do it manually until this is fixed.

So, remember when I integrated the mail and comment checking into the same script?

Turns out that makes the bot a bit less reliable, which is a bummer, because it guarantees that both are up and down at the same time. We'd never hit a situation where someone would be getting notifications without being able to modify their settings.

So there's two ways I can fix this.

1. Separate the bot into two scripts again.

2. Put the mail handler in a daemon thread, start up an external handler, and create a new client that points to the other handler.

Obviously the 2nd option is the more complex one, but I also think it's the more complete solution, so I'll be configuring stuff to do that over the next week or so. We'll see how it goes. As usual, I'm sure I'll make a post updating you guys on the results. 'Til then, peace.

It will be off for probably the course of 24 hours while I modify its host environment. Once it's back up, I'll make another post.

Preamble:

Something I realized the other day is that, with how much the /u/sub_mentions bot inboxes people, there's basically no content on its profile page, so I figured I'd leave this text-post here, so as to leave some information for those exploring more about this bot (me).

If you already know what this bot does, then maybe this post is not for you.

With that out of the way, here's some info about this bot.

/u/sub_mentions is a keyword notification bot; basically meaning, if <x> is posted on reddit, tell <y> about it. That's the basic concept of it, which is boiling a lot of work down to a very small sentence.

Another thing worth noting is that /u/sub_mentions is not just one bot. It's effectively 2 (or 3, depending on how you argue semantics).

Its original purpose was to support a feature similar to username-mentions, but for subreddits. That endeavor is supported by the subreddit in which this post is being made. Ideally this would allows subreddits to become aware of traffic sources and potential brigades. Also maybe drama if you're into that sort of thing.

Following that project, I developed an alternative project for notifying any user of any keyword notification, not just specifically subreddit mentions or links. And because that bot wasn't specifically tied to the reddit interface, I created an independent front-end for it over at http://redditcomber.com. Needs work, but it gets the job done.

There are a couple of distinctions though, which should help you decide which to use when exploring the services this bot offers.

The SubNotifications service has the ability to send notifications to modmail as well as to an individual user's inbox. This permission effectively inherits from mail permission of a moderator. If they can send messages on behalf of the mod team they can subscribe or unsubscribe the entire mod team from this service. With that in mind, notifications are restricted very heavily to only links and mentions of other subreddits.

The RedditComber service has no content restriction apart from overly-common words. You can use special characters, it looks for all cases, and will find words so long as they are part of a single isolated alphanumeric sequence. For example if you search for "text1", it will find it in the sequence "//TEXT1+text2+text3", but not in the sequence "text123". You can also search for content with spaces like "ayy lmao", and it will be found just so long as the leading and trailing characters are not alphanumeric.

So in comparison, the RedditComber service is a lot more powerful, but also for more personal information searching. Like a video game? Wanna join the conversation about something interesting? That's the tool for you. Wanna know when people are talking about your subreddit? Go with SubNotifications.

I hope this serves as an adequate resource / explanation on what this bot is for, but if you have any further questions, please feel free to message /u/The1RGood.

Peace.

Hey guys, so that handler change I mentioned last post is now live. Nothing changes from your end, but I figured I'd take a minute to explain what I did and what it means.

Basically, the API ratelimit means you can only send so many requests to the reddit API very often. I can get around this to some degree by creating two handlers that deal with different aspects of the bot, both of which have their own handler delay.

One handler deals solely with scraping every single reddit comment.

The other handler deals with checking the bot's inbox every few seconds, and sending out notifications to you guys about when a comment is found.

This basically alleviates some of the pressure put on a single handler by pushing a ton of traffic through it. Even with lax ratelimit restrictions already, we were starting to hit a bottleneck. Now, we should be good for the foreseeable future, because any new signups will be sent to the mail handler, which will always have less to do.

Anyway, I apologize for the couple weeks of intermittent service. That should no longer be a problem.

Cheers dudes and dudettes.

Edit: I think I'm going to change the footer to link to the "latest update" post in here.

Also showing promising results for subscription service not failing.

Thanks for continued use of my bot.

So you may have noticed a minor lapse in service.

Well, the rug was kind of pulled out from under me on the last server I was using, so I had to migrate to my new one on short notice.

That's still the case, and I've spent my time getting https://redditcomber.com back online, but now I'll be moving onto the bot for this sub.

Thanks for bearing with me, sorry for the delayed notice about it.

Both bots are now up and running on their new server. Enjoy.

Please test the bot to your convenience.