r/realtech • u/firemylasers • Apr 30 '14
General discussion/feedback/questions, subreddit news/information, etc.
Do you have a suggestion? A comment? Criticism? Praise? A domain/keyword to ban, an improvement to the bot, or anything? Just leave a comment below or PM me (click HERE to PM me)!
Okay, time for a little update. I'm not that interested in this project these days, and I'm too busy with university to care about tech news. I have done nothing to the bot in quite some time beyond a minor filter list update. For the time being, this will probably continue. (The source code is also a bit hard to understand at this point, it's not the most elegantly written bot and I threw together features and patches a bit haphazardly). If you have a proposed feature addition, have noticed a problem (such as the bot stopping posting), or want me to blacklist another keyword/domain, please PM me. I'll keep this bot/subreddit active indefinitely, the VPS it's on is needed for other stuff and the bot is completely automatic (it also hasn't broken in quite some time), but I won't be actively improving it. I'm not sure how many people actually find this to be a useful alternative to /r/technology, but based on voting patterns, traffic, and subreddit subscriptions, it does seem that there are at least some people out there who find it useful, so I won't be shutting this down or anything. Just be aware that I am not currently working on this project and if there's an issue you will need to bring it to my attention for it to get fixed.
Another little update (2/5/2015): I'm even more busy with university these days. I've updated the submission stats below (close to 72k URLs submitted in the past year and a half!). The bot seems to be running fine with zero monitoring, and subreddit traffic has held fairly steady every month since the last big drop around July 2014. The log file is a bit massive, but I've got plenty of spare disk space. I still have no plans to update the bot, and while I'm not quite happy with the current filters, I don't think there are any obvious improvements that I could make. The traffic counts seem to indicate that this subreddit is still useful, which is excellent. If anyone has any ideas for keywords to block/restrict (or domains), feel free to PM me.
News
News prior to 4/29/14 can be found in the old version of this thread (click here to view it).
On July 29th, the bot was down for around eight hours due to what seems to be an unannounced change in reddit's API. I didn't notice the issue until the bot had been down for six hours, and it took me quite a while to figure out exactly what the issue was and how to fix it. Anyways, the bot is back up now, sorry about that.
It looks like the content in both /r/technology and /r/realtech has been going downhill recently. I've tweaked the filters a bit, which should hopefully improve things.
Rough development ideas
Tweak the flood limit to eliminate post flooding after bot downtime.
Consider a tag system. I could either tag with the original usernames, or with a bot-guessed topic.
Stats
Last updated 04/09/15
Total unique URLs submitted: 80743
Top 20 domains (with submission counts):
2850 arstechnica.com
2805 www.theverge.com
2479 techcrunch.com
1778 www.engadget.com
1675 www.wired.com
1293 www.theguardian.com
1212 www.nytimes.com
1153 www.bbc.co.uk
1140 www.businessinsider.com
963 mashable.com
898 www.washingtonpost.com
858 www.reuters.com
817 www.cnet.com
816 www.zdnet.com
795 www.forbes.com
759 gigaom.com
703 www.bbc.com
703 phys.org
700 thenextweb.com
633 www.techdirt.comInformation
Aladdin was written in Ruby. It uses the Snoo API wrapper to access reddit's API. The bot runs on a cheap 128MB low end VPS. It scrapes /r/technology every ten minutes, 24/7.
