Monkey Bot on Twitter.

Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Discussion/Monkey Bot on Twitter.

Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2014) [#1]
Sup all tweeter's , I'm tinkering with this https://twitter.com/MonkeyXBot , if I can get it functional then it will retweet anything tagged with #monkeyx .

At the moment it's working and I'v just pushed a little code change to make sure it ignores it's own tweets, will know if its worked when it does another push in about 30 minutes.

The method I am using is not perfect, but it should be more than adequate to help spread the word both about monkey, and about the users who happen to be tweeting about monkey.

Anyway. like I said just tinkering, if I can get it all fully working cool. if not no harm done.


Nobuyuki(Posted 2014) [#2]
I'll add this one to my list of interesting bots.


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2014) [#3]
Cool, it seems to be working as intended now.


therevills(Posted 2014) [#4]
Nice one Paul, I thought it was an "official" BRL Bot! LOL!

It would be good if it retweeted correctly and it seems to repeat the tweets, but good job so far!


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2014) [#5]
it should be now only tweeting new tweets and it should be ignoring itself, I throw in a little If !== self to the rss generator.

And yeah I would love it to actually retweet but that functionality is not possible, at least I do not think it is via the method I am using which is free and requires zero hosting , it's being done using google script's twitter widgets and a site called twitterfeed which pulls new data from an rss feed and feeds that into a tweet.

I was thinking about having it also handle tags like #blitzmax and #blitzbasic but I think I will leave that till I see if the #monkeyx tag gets any traction.

Oh and as is always the case with me, any feedback is welcome, or suggestions.


Nobuyuki(Posted 2014) [#6]
I'm looking into figuring out a way to have your bot retweet instead of copy a tweet. The problem with the latter is that Twitter kinda doesn't like that when something contains a tag, because it "pollutes the timeline" of a given hashtag with the bot's tweets.

Edit: There are a number of bots here that you can host on your own machine, or any place you have hosting that can run scripts in the languages provided. I'd host some of this stuff on my own machine, if I was still running a server, but ymmv.
https://github.com/search?q=twitter+bot&ref=cmdform
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/open-source-examples

You may not need to host on a server if you can find one written as a standalone service, in say, C# or VB.NET. I didn't filter languages, so have fun. Oh, also, you'll need a Twitter API key.


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2014) [#7]
I saw that list the other day while initially looking at the problem, some of them offer good solutions others not so much, they all required hosting of some sort either on my PC or my webhost and I didn't want to go that route, my host is pushing the limits of its available resources so I really don't want to throw much more at it, and I would hate to be responsible for having my PC on all the time to catch a retweet.

The solution I settled on required the least amount of effort and is all done remotely and managed simply thanks to google and twitterfeed.

If some one comes up with a solution and has the hosting to deal with it 99% of the time then I am more than happy to grant access to the account, for me this is all about spreading the word about monkey and the community, not at all bothered about who manages it, would be real cool if Mark took it off our hands and hosted the bot himself.


ziggy(Posted 2014) [#8]
That's very nice!


consty(Posted 2014) [#9]
Very interesting, I would like to try code one as well one day just for educational purposes.


Sensei(Posted 2014) [#10]
Nice one Paul. Quite a good idea to spread the Monkey word.
I'll start using it in my Blackjet tweets.


Snader(Posted 2014) [#11]
It seems that the bot sometimes does the mentioning twice with a gap between them of 12 hours.


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2014) [#12]
yes it does indeed, sadly nothing I can do about it, the website twitterfeed.com actually handles the act of tweeting and it's supposed to know the difference between a tweet it's already seen and one that's new, sometimes it gets it wrong, either way it's out of my control.

It's fortunate that it only happens every now and then, and I suspect that if the Hashtag ever gets more popular then it would happen far less that it is now because the feeder would have more actual new content to look at.


Snader(Posted 2014) [#13]
Sadly indeed. Somehow it happens always with my tweets:

MonkeyX @MonkeyXBot 2m
Check Out - @VoornMultimedia : After 30 levels of giving presents by Mr. #Penguin, they need a bigger house! #gamedev #monkeyx pic.tw...

MonkeyX @MonkeyXBot 12h
Check Out - @VoornMultimedia : After 30 levels of giving presents by Mr. #Penguin, they need a bigger house! #gamedev #monkeyx pic.tw...

MonkeyX @MonkeyXBot 1d
Check Out - @VoornMultimedia : After 30 levels of giving presents by Mr. #Penguin, they need a bigger house! #gamedev #monkeyx pic.tw...


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2014) [#14]
probably because you happen to be the last one to have tweeted something and there are no new tweets tagged with #monkeyx at the moment ? only a guess tho, iv not been following the progress of twitter all that close, been busy with other stuff.


Snader(Posted 2014) [#15]
Since I am still the last one.. isn't it better to review this 'service', since it's starts to get really annoying. The gamedev bot is retweeting the monkeyx bot. So it was time that I deleted my tweet.


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2014) [#16]
I'm going to throw a support request at them and find out why it's happening the way it is, there might be something they can fix, in the mean time I will tweet something random to stop your constant retweeting to the other bot.


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2014) [#17]
in the meantime if anyone has a better free solution for a bot , or is willing to take over and host a bot I am more than willing to give over the account on twitter, I started this to help spread the word about monkey I'm not bothered at all who actually manages it.


Snader(Posted 2014) [#18]
Thanks Paul! Appreciate your effort.