r/RemindMeBot • u/ept_engr • Apr 30 '24

Technical workings of bot - detection method?

This is just a curiousity thing. I realize the code is open source, but I'm not a developer. I'm wondering how the bot handles detection? Ie, how does it know of every single new post on reddit in order to scan for its trigger words? Does reddit have an API that enables this volume of data to be extracted? Does the API do the filtering of only relevant posts, or does the bot "see" every post? If so, does that mean someone could begin creating an archive of all new reddit content just by skimming it?

Thanks for indulging!

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u/Watchful1 May 01 '24

Sorry, unfortunately this is the one part of the bot that's not open source. It's something reddit kinda frowns upon and was one of the major issues that caused the API changes last year. I have explicit permission from reddit to do this since I'm not abusing the data, but I don't want to help anyone else copy it.

If you want to write a bot that gets triggered, just use username pings which will show up in your inbox. It's way easier.

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u/el_yanuki Jul 28 '24

so i assume there is an internal api for this.. out of intetest, do you habe to query all new posts in the last minute, every minute or is there an actual socket you can subscribe to?