Hello!

I was wondering if lemmy.world has any bot restrictions / throttling behavior? I have a bot (ported from reddit) that is performing the same activities on lemmy.world and fanaticus.social, but I’m seeing different behavior: on LW posts aren’t being featured correctly and comments aren’t being added. I’m not seeing any significant configuration differences, and they are running the same code - Is there a server side explanation for this?

If you have any other suggestions for good bot lemmetiquette, I’d definitely like to hear them!

  • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I don’t see anything in the instance rules about bots: https://mastodon.world/about (yes, that’s a mastodon instance, it’s linked from our instance sidebar… the admins are the same and that’s where they post the rules for both).

    The backend versions are real close. So it doesn’t FEEL like it should be an API issue. But lemmy.world is a heavily tuned instance that often runs pre-release code that hasn’t yet been merged upstream in order to deal with its large scale. It’s possible some API behaves differently, but to get meaningful help I think it’s likely you’ll have to debug it down to a particular API call and post the whole request/response from the two servers (omitting credentials).

    Separate from your issue, is your code open-source? I profile stalked you to see what you might be doing and saw your test posts look like a sports community. I know the mods of !formula1@lemmy.ml are on the prowl for helper bots for raceday threads and such so I’m trying to keep an eye on what’s available.

    • cerevant@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been debugging and log crawling, but the live nature of my input data makes it difficult. The existing codebase doesn’t really have support for simulating inputs, so a lot of testing can only be done when games are running. The logs aren’t showing any post / edit errors, so I’m a bit baffled. I know that the bots were causing some hassle when the websockets issue was still present, so I wanted to check to see if we were throttled.

      The code is up here which is a WIP fork of the reddit bot. It has been adapted for other sports, but not for racing that I’m aware of.

      • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Does it support setting a proxy? An intercepting proxy with debugger features might give you the details you’re missing. https://mitmproxy.org/ is one popular/free option, though there are many others.

        Mitmproxy even supports a transparent mode, though that requires more network shenanigans to set up. If an explicit proxy is supported in redball, that’s definitely easiest to configure.