r/UpdateMeBot • u/Watchful1 • May 09 '20

UpdateMeBot Info v2.0

What is UpdateMeBot?

UpdateMeBot is a reddit bot that lets you subscribe to users in specific subreddits and get a message every time they post. Use it to follow authors that regularly post content or get up an update on an interesting thread.

UpdateMeBot commands

Comment commands:

  • SubscribeMe! Subscribes to the author of the post it's commented on. The bot will send you a message every time they post in that subreddit until you tell it to stop.
  • UpdateMe! Subscribes to the author of the post it's commented on. The bot will send you a message only the next time they post in that subreddit.

Message commands, these only work as messages to the bot:

  • SubscribeMe! r/subreddit u/author Subscribes to the author in the subreddit from the message. The bot will send you a message every time they post in that subreddit until you tell it to stop.
  • UpdateMe! r/subreddit u/author Subscribes to the author in the subreddit from the message. The bot will send you a message only the next time they post in that subreddit.
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/UpdateMeBot/comments/4wirnm/updatemebot_info/ Sent the full link of a post to subscribe to that author and subreddit. The bot will either send you a message each time or just the next time they post based on a per subreddit default.
  • Remove r/subreddit u/author Removes your subscription or pending update to an author in a subreddit.
  • MySubscriptions Responds with a list of all your subscriptions.

Message links

UpdateMeBot makes use of prefilled message links, like this one. From my research, these links work correctly in the browser on the classic site, the redesign, the mobile web site, and every single reddit app, except the official iOS reddit app. If you are on iOS, you can open the link in your mobile browser, switch to a different reddit app, or wait till you're on a computer browser.

Limited subreddits

The bot works by checking every subreddit that someone is subscribed to every few minutes. Each subreddit it checks takes several seconds, so I have to limit the number of subreddits or the bot will get overloaded. New subreddits are automatically added once they get enough requests.

Source

The bot is open source:

https://github.com/Watchful1/UpdateMeBot

Changelog

2.0: Completely rewrote code. If an author subscribes to themselves, they will receive a message after all the other messages for a post is sent stating how many messages were sent.

91 Upvotes

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u/MrMrRubic Feb 23 '23

Would it be possible to filter it so you only get notified of post with a certain title? Like the name of a series with a wildcard?

1

u/Watchful1 Feb 23 '23

Unfortunately I was never able to get that working in a way both didn't slow the bot down too much and that authors could use. The titles that authors used ended up being too different in enough cases for it to be consistent.

1

u/MrMrRubic Feb 23 '23

I see, i assume *series title* or something would be too heavy for the bot to process? Too bad, but the bot's still an amazing utility!

1

u/Watchful1 Feb 23 '23

Yeah, there's two issues.

The first is just the way databases work. It's possible, though kinda slow, for the bot to take the title of the post, go through all the people who have subscribed to the author and compare each wildcard like that. If that's all there was to it I would just do that.

But the second issue is usability. If the author forgets the series in the title, then has to delete the post and re-create it. Or they misspell it. Or they usually put [] brackets around the title so everyone puts that in their wildcard and then one time they do () instead.

It's been a few years since I looked at it seriously, but when I did there were too many authors who were too inconsistent with their titles for it to be useful. Maybe that's changed now? What subreddits do you follow authors in?

1

u/MrMrRubic Feb 23 '23

I see, that's quite the limitation, and no way to force the authors to do it one way or another.

For me, I am mostly just on r/HFY, and there's a lot of variations there, so i doubt it be an optimal query...

Thanks for the insight though :)