[DISCONTINUED] Automator WIKI - Automator, the forum bot

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[DISCONTINUED] Automator, the forum bot.

Automator is offline and will no longer be online, this bot was denied permission to roam the forums of Glitch, so I’m burying it somewhere in stockholm.

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The official topic for Automator.

Automator is an unofficial Discourse Bot that wanders around the Glitch Support forum. It specifically is on the lookout for topics that ask about domain removals. Domain removals are supposed to be emailed directly to Glitch’s support email ([email protected]). Instead of having a lot of users wasting their time in responding to these posts when they could have done something else, Automator is here to save the day!

If you have seen a similar post like the one in Figure 1 you have most likely stumbled across @automator. Automator is here to help everyone save time and enjoy their stay at the Glitch Support forum.

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Figure 1: An automated message sent by @automator in response to a topic regarding domain removals.

Hopefully, Automator will stay here for a long time helping you all out.

Feature Ideas

Please send your feature ideas on this topic, and I will try to get back to everyone! :slight_smile:

Bugs

Please send any issues or concerns you may have of the bot in this thread, or in my DMs or to [email protected]. If you don’t wish to get in touch with me you can send a complaint to [email protected] regarding this post, the bot, or a specific feature about the bot, and glitch will discretely contact me with issues you may have.

Check list format

  • To do
  • Doing
  • Done

Plans

  • I will continue developing the bot as far as this goes.
  • I will try to get in touch with Glitch regarding permission to run this bot.
  • I will try to get a hold of an API from Glitch so I can better develop the bot.

I hope that the bot will not be denied permission to run on the forum, however, if the case is that I do not get permission I will take down the bot and bury it deep Somewhere in Stockholm.

Feature Ideas (by Community)

  • Receive ideas from the community.
  • Add label [mega-thread] when a topic has 100+ posts in it. (@khalby786)
  • Do not respond to topics that already have another post that is suggesting sending email to glitch. (@khalby786)

Planned features

  • A button for staff & bot moderators that deletes the post if it is irrelevant to the topic.
  • Use a machine learning algorithm (kNN & reinforcement) to determine whether or not a topic is asking for a domain removal.
  • Use a supervised machine learning algorithm (kNN) to determine whether or not a post is inappropriate.
  • A dashboard to view the bots’ activities.
  • An official API to interact with the bot.
  • Add more automated responses on various topics.
  • Action & Audit log: See what the bot has done on the forum, and see what bot mods have done on the dashboard.

QA

Q: Is the bot official?

No, the bot is not a glitch official bot, it is officially developed by @ihack2712 and the community.

Q: I need to write 'domain' in my topic, how do I prevent Automator from responding?

If you include -automator- anywhere in your topic body it will prevent Automator from sending an automatic response.

Open Source

I really want to open-source this project once I get explicit permission from Glitch. That way everyone can contribute to the Automator bot.

Contributions

Currently, I do not accept contributions to the source code, mainly because I have not gotten explicit permission to run the bot from Glitch. Once I get permission from Glitch and the source code is stable, secure, and documented I will open the repository for contributions.

How can I help?

For the moment you can only hope that Glitch will allow the bot to run on the forum.

Later I will ask certain forum regulars if they wish to help me moderate the bot.

Changelog

  • [Sun 26 Jul] Added ‘Automator is not is not affiliated with Glitch.’ on automatic responses.
  • [Fri 24 Jul] Added -automator- keyword to prevent Automator from sending an automatic response to a topic.
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Any suggestions? 

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I need to wait 11 hours before deleting it.

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Changelog Updates:

  • [Fri 24 Jul] Added -automator- keyword to prevent Automator from sending an automatic response to a topic.
Q: I need to write 'domain' in my topic, how do I prevent Automator from respond?

If you include -automator- anywhere in your topic body it will prevent Automator from sending an automatic response.

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I’ve sent a final request to Glitch as I haven’t been completely happy with the ones I had sent.

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I would very much support the usage of this bot in this forum, it saves a lot of time, everyone gets instant replies, everyone becomes happy.

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Thanks a lot for the support! I really hope Glitch will take that into consideration!

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Just saw this post, I am indeed also planning this :smiley:

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Considering using a machine learning algorithm to decide whether or not a topic is requesting domain removal or not, what do y’all think? Should I attempt that?

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Yes, although I wish GPT-3 was here in this forum. :sweat_smile:

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import tensorflow as tf

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To be honest I’m not really a fan of tensor flow, I’ll probably just be using k nearest neighbour algorithm combined with reinforcement learning.

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Not to flex or anything but I just beat the bot in a race to respond:

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Hahah! Probably due to the 1 minute intervals, you’re quick though!

If you somehow are challenging me I will put the interval to every 5 seconds!! (just kidding, not gonna do that).

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Lol, not sure the VPS would like that.

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My VPS would be fine with that, but I can see why if Glitch got annoyed by it :joy:

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I was actually thinking about this yesterday, when @ihack2712 mentioned that it scrapes the website every 5 minutes. :joy:

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How about a cron job? Every five minutes?

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It’s actually not scraping, it is using the official discourse API to get recent topics, and then using puppeteer just to login and post the topic :wink:

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I’m not really a fan of cron-jobs, but it would have worked. The reason why a cron-job is bad for this case is because:

  • Launching puppeteer is slow and uses unnecessary resources.
  • Everytime puppeteer is started it has to login to github before going to the glitch support forums.

So in one way, using just a single threaded application is easier and uses less resources for both the Glitch support forum and my VPS.

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Bug fix/suggestion:

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That’s a good idea, I’ll take it under advisement. But for now I’m not going to implement it because I’d like to get the main and most important features first. It doesn’t hurt to get multiple answers :wink: Thanks for idea though!

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Feature idea: swearing filter, which can automatically flag posts as inappropriate if inappropriate words are found in a post.

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I mean… I don’t know. Not sure if that is 100% necessary because as long as you aren’t dropping f bombs, some swearing doesn’t hurt.

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Already a planned feature.

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Also I will need some forum regulars to help me train a machine learning algorithm for various things. Please send me DM if I can count on you :slight_smile:

I won’t probably ask you to do anything for some time because there is a lot of other things I need to do first.

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Not such a big fan of automated flagging, I just feel like a lot could go wrong…

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Indeed, I am thinking that flagging could also be handled by ML with supervised learning, meaning that posts aren’t flagged unless the action is approved by a bot mod.

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Woah this is gonna be awesome, can’t wait to see the machine learning doing its thing.

I might have missed it, but has Glitch gotten back to you yet about letting it roam free?

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Haven’t got back to my email, don’t think they have for @ihack2712’s either.

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Glitch only replies to emails within business hours MON-fri, I’m still waiting for a reply. I dont want to add any features before I Get the permission to run the bot :slight_smile:

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Hi all! Just letting you know that today is a new week and Glitch is getting back to work today (remotely of course!). I’m thinking they’ll probably use 1-3 days to reply, but please note that it might take more time :smiley: Have a nice day :smiley:

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Just a quick form to get started on ML for Automator. Anyone over the age of 13 can participate.

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Over the age of thirteen? My birthday is next next week, can an exception be made? :joy:

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Sorry, I was a bit unclear on that one, I meant 13 years or older :wink: This has to do with GDPR.

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Dude, the third part of the test was more stressful than a Mental Ability test. :joy: And I loved the example about a nude-person-website being a custom domain removal. :rofl: :rofl:

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how is the ml gonna work

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The automated message responses will use a machine learning method called kNN with reinforcement. It’ll take these (but not limited to) factors into considerations:

  • Word count
  • Words used in the topic
  • Whether or not the topic includes a domain of any kind.
  • Whether or not the topic is asking a question (3rd party service will determine this).
  • Whether or not the topic is implying that the OP wants to do something (3rd party service will determine this).

More properties will be figured out later. I’ll have to discuss this with a friend of mine who knows a little bit about machine learning.

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Um. These answers are yes/no questions which basically everyone could agree in, I feel like the time making the google form coulda been sent just straight up categorizing the msgs

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I’m aware, the purpose of questions are not to be difficult to be answer, it is just for mock data when working on the ML script.

EDIT: Questions can also be interpreted in a different way interpreted by yourself, which is very important data to emit in an ML algorithm.

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All done :+1:

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everyone on the forums should be 13+ lmao

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That is true, no one under 13 should be on Glitch or on the forums.

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Have you thought about the fact that some annoying people go through forms like this answering randomly? You should probably check they are real answers (e.g. Emails or forum accounts). That’s why when I did my Glitch Description form, I collected emails and usernames and names so that I could omit fake/example form submissions. Same for any project that allows signups that I put on the forum, minutes later I get [email protected] accounts added and I need to spend the time adding email verification.

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I collected emails and forum username as well :wink:

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Yes, but you should probably check them before adding the submissions to the training data

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I’m very aware :slight_smile: I’m very careful when it comes to actively used data :wink:

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I faced this problem when new users registered on GlitchyPastePen, I got email addresses filled with [email protected] and [email protected] and a really ridiculous email which I liked very much lmao. That was the primary reason why I switched to GitHub oAuth.

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is it possible to setup a glitch fourms clone with discourse for testing? (like maybe on a glitch project?)

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I actually have a discourse instance running, although it’s running locally, which I am also using for testing :slight_smile:

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yeah but what if you made a public version so people could help with that machine learning thing?

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I will make a public version of everything later, but for now until I get Glitch’s permission I will have everything privately so no-one else can easily spin up their own instance of the bot. Even though it is easy to make :thinking: However, I will open-source everything once Glitch gives me a thumbs up :smiley: Deal?

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Tasha said this is another email about a bug I reported:

@ihack2712

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Due to a recent bug report I’m turning the bot offline. My main priority right now will be looking through the entire forum and just find all the posts about domain removal and some posts that are similar and some posts that aren’t about domain removal. I’ll be starting to create an ML to filter out posts. Until then, my bot will remain offline.

Thanks,
James.

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Sorry folks! Seems like I’ve gotta discontinue the bot development!

It was very fun while it lasted :slight_smile:

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I mean, if you do have a VPS, you could deploy discourse and mess around with it some more i suppose.

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I just don’t really see the point in continue developing in the bot when it was denied to run on this forum. The main goal of the bot was to make things easier for everyone here, and running it on my own forum doesn’t really help anyone. :confused:

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Wouls you consider posting the source to github? It seems like a good idea for maybe another forum/discourse instance.

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Sorry, I’d rather not open-source it since I didn’t get the permission from Glitch, however I will gladly any questions or concerns you may have :slight_smile:

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Got a very similar reply. Very sad, but makes sense :frowning:

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Out of curiosity, can you send your response in DMs?

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Glitch should invest time into making there own-bot for the discourse fourm

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Since they won’t allow my bot I totally agree with you!

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@ihack2712

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However, otherwise, people would be upset that their bot wasn’t permitted and @ihack2712’s was or they would just make the bot anyway without permission, assuming that because @ihack2712’s was permitted, so would there’s

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@disc-boop398 The problem is, if Glitch allows one person to use a bot other people also will want to create a bot. It’s not fair if only one person can run a bot.

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Oh man, this was an awesome bot!

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@ihack2712 don’t delete the source code of this bot from your machine or, you can push the code to a private repo, who knows, maybe bots might be allowed some time in the future or could be used in similar Discourse forums. :wink:

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Indeed! The code is actually already stored on gitlab (moving away from github and my own gitea server). Although the repository is private and I won’t set it to public. However if Glitch sometime in the feature allow the bot the I can easily spin it back up :slight_smile:

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Wowzers! I can’t believe how much attraction this project got just within the first 4-5 days! Thanks y’all :smiley: Anyway, it’s just a shame this project wasn’t allowed to thrive, maybe something similar to this will be made by Glitch in the future, but we can only hope!

Anyway, have a good evening / morning everybody :wave:

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lol your [email protected] is also Something Else?

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Yeah. That’s the support ticket category they choose for your email. However, in this case I chose it myself via Happyfox

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okay i see it, @ihack2712.
junboon17