Yes Firedrake, this is what my bot has been doing!

A long time ago in an ATer's profile far, far away I forget whose, somebody asked what would happen if a bot was to start posting on the suggestions forum. I decided to find out!
My bot has been posting 10 times a day during the morning on suggestion topics. It was programmed to be biased towards topics on the front page, but it could pick one from farther back.

How did my bot work?
It was actually quite simple. I made a list of possible responses, and had the bot use the selenium module to post a response chosen from random on that topic. You can find the source code here.

What were the results?
For the most part, nothing happened. People treated my bot's posts just like all the others. There were a couple incidents, however.
The first one was a suggestion for a better forum system, and my bot posted

workaroundable, no support.

That got people riled up!

My bot also posted

add [me] to [supporters  v]

on a spam topic, which made Zro tell my bot to stop being funny

So what do you think of this?
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the bot's username is Sparkfunny

Here is a list of all the topics my bot posted on:

BookOwl wrote:

Yes Firedrake, this is what my bot has been doing!

A long time ago in an ATer's profile far, far away I forget whose, somebody asked what would happen if a bot was to start posting on the suggestions forum. I decided to find out!
My bot has been posting 10 times a day during the morning on suggestion topics. It was programmed to be biased towards topics on the front page, but it could pick one from farther back.

How did my bot work?
It was actually quite simple. I made a list of possible responses, and had the bot use the selenium module to post a response chosen from random on that topic. You can find the source code here.

What were the results?
For the most part, nothing happened. People treated my bot's posts just like all the others. There were a couple incidents, however.
The first one was a suggestion for a better forum system, and my bot posted

workaroundable, no support.

That got people riled up!

My bot also posted

add [me] to [supporters  v]

on a spam topic, which made Zro tell my bot to stop being funny

So what do you think of this?
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the bot's username is Sparkfunny

Selenium is awesome, I use it all the time!

Also https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/post/1684518/

You horrible person. (jk)

It would be interesting if you could analyze the sentiment of posts and determine what the crowd is saying, and then post something similar.

Firedrake969 wrote:

You horrible person. (jk)

It would be interesting if you could analyze the sentiment of posts and determine what the crowd is saying, and then post something similar.

I might make a bot to reply to your posts and say “don't listen to them, they are a bot”

Dylan5797 wrote:

Firedrake969 wrote:

You horrible person. (jk)

It would be interesting if you could analyze the sentiment of posts and determine what the crowd is saying, and then post something similar.

I might make a bot to reply to your posts and say “don't listen to them, they are a bot”

And then replies with a similar random statement out of a randomly generated list.

Muhahahahahaha.

Then the forums will be run by bots….

Dylan5797 wrote:

Also https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/post/1684518/

https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/174580/?page=1#post-1682009 hehe

Now here's an idea. Create a bot which reads the information in the topic post and then attempts to generate a reason for supporting/not supporting.

Your bot posted 50% support on one of my suggestions! I though it was a regular user, until I saw this topic.

hehe

I knew it was a bot the whole time. little nod to you

also it was my profile. i had this idea for a long time but i thought it would get banned quickly. great implementation!

Well.

I actually don't know what to do with this information.

Well played, BookOwl. Well played.

I knew something was fishy about sparkfunny.
One does not simply support a topic that wants to fine people for having 50MB projects

IronBit_Studios wrote:

I knew something was fishy about sparkfunny.
One does not simply support a topic that wants to fine people for having 50MB projects

True.

DaSpudLord wrote:

Well.

I actually don't know what to do with this information.

Well played, BookOwl. Well played.

Yup. ^^

no support, workaroundable.

Anyway - I am quite clueless here - is the goal to make a bot that behaves like a human, or annoy people? “What would happen if a bot was to start posting on the suggestions forum” doesn't give much information

Rumanti wrote:

Anyway - I am quite clueless here - is the goal to make a bot that behaves like a human, or annoy people? “What would happen if a bot was to start posting on the suggestions forum” doesn't give much information

Basically, it was an experiment to see if a bot could get away with posting on the suggestions forum for a long-ish period of time (5 days). It also turned out to be a good protest against bad quality posts.

IronBit_Studios wrote:

I knew something was fishy about sparkfunny.
One does not simply support a topic that wants to fine people for having 50MB projects

Maybe Sparkfunny likes making people spend money!

DaSpudLord wrote:

Well.

I actually don't know what to do with this information.

Well played, BookOwl. Well played.

ChocolatePi wrote:

I knew it was a bot the whole time. little nod to you

also it was my profile. i had this idea for a long time but i thought it would get banned quickly. great implementation!

Thanks!

liam48D wrote:

hehe

I found a new hobby: read all the reactions to my bot's posts!

BookOwl wrote:

I found a new hobby: read all the reactions to my bot's posts!

Really I thought that bot was a real person too xD

So should the post be valid or sodium hydrogen?