Banhacker

Mariavi's take on Reddit moderation.

GPL-3.0 License

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Ecosystems: Python

Banhacker

By Mariavi

Banhacker is the very first bot to integrate Banhammer.py. A framework that enables a seamless moderation experience for Reddit. It was created during the 2019 Discord Hack Week Event and showcases the functionality of the framework in a very simple fashion on Mariavi's Banhammer Discord server. Additionally, it serves as a testing platform for the framework and will continue to do so in the future.

Functionality

The bot streams different types of items from subreddits that are registered to it, such as reported posts, mod actions, and mod-mail to dedicated channels and allows you to react to some of them with Reactions. Its current configuration scans everything in a five-minute loop.

Example of new post streamed to its dedicated channel:

After you respond to a message by clicking on one of its reactions, Banhacker will perform the action configured to the selected reaction, delete the source message from the current channel, and send the message to either the #approved-posts or #removed-posts channel. Those actions can be customized by going to the subreddit's wiki page (called banhammer-reactions), which is automatically created if it doesn't exist and automatically filled with default reactions if there aren't any configured.

Example of post approved by a moderator:

Commands

Banhacker doesn't make much use of Discord.py's command framework due to its design, though it has two commands and one on_message() trigger. All the commands use the ! prefix.

  • help: The default Discord.py help command. A version of the Mariavi HelpCommand will be integrated in the future.
  • status: Displays all the subreddits set up and their activated streams.
  • reactions: Shows an embed with all the subreddits and their reactions, with relevant attributes.
Subreddits' statuses Reactions

Banhacker allows users to post URLs in a channel within the BANHACKER category (e.g. #mod-chat) and then take action on it. When a message is sent to one of the channels, Banhacker will search for Reddit URLs in the message pointing to an item within the registered subreddit(s) and add any applicable reactions to the message. If more than one URL is found, the first one is used.

Presence

To showcase a recently added feature to the framework, the bot's presence changes to "Playing on /r/subname" when Banhammer is scanning subreddits. This helps moderators know when the bot is busy and may not be able to respond to reactions and commands.

The bot's changed presence when scanning a subreddit:

Personal Use

Creating your own Banhacker is very easy! Head to the Discord Developer Portal and create your bot account. After that clone the repository to your local machine and make sure you have the dependancies (see below) installed. Now head to the config.py file and edit the values. If you do not need a stream, feel free to set the channel ID to 0 but also make sure that none of your configured subreddits have that stream enabled otherwise the bot will raise errors. Lastly, create a praw.ini file as per PRAW's instructions as well as a discord.ini file that follows the following format:

[BH]
token=TOKEN
client_id=CLIENT_ID

Make sure that if you change BH to something else in the discord.ini file you change this line of code in the bot:

bot.run(config["BH"]["token"])

Same thing if you change the name in your praw.ini file:

bh = banhammer.Banhammer(praw.Reddit("TBHB"), bot=bot, change_presence=config["change_presence"])

Important to note is that you need both PRAW and Discord.py installed as they are required to interact with Discord's and Reddit's API. They can be installed with the following terminal commands:

  • pip3 install -U discord.py
  • pip3 install -U praw

Now that you have everything setup and all your dependancies installed, run the banhacker.py file on your machine and see it in action! More information on how to use Banhammer.py as well as updates can be found on its GitHub page.

Note for Discord Hack Week judges

Due to the fact that the demo gives you moderation access to the /r/banhammerdemo subreddit, if you have joined to evaluate the bot's functionality, you will need to notify the moderators of the server so they can assign a role to you. You will then see the #mod-chat, #new-posts, #approved-posts, #removed-posts, #mod-mail, #report-queue, #mod-queue and #mod-actions channels within the BANHACKER category.

Though the repository has undergone changes since the end of submissions, the demo in the Mariavi server uses the state of the commit e94abad which was made prior to the end of submissions. The changes after that were made to the testing platform of the framework or the ReadMe.

Contributing

Due to the fact that this bot will serve as a testing platform for the Banhammer.py, we won't be accepting pull requests on this repository. We will accept pull requests on the framework so go check out its GitHub repository!

The Banhammer Bot and Reddify

In addition to the open-source framework, and this bot as an example for it, a proprietary version of the bot, called The Banhammer Bot, is being made by the Mariavi developers. It doesn't require any coding knowledge by the user and will be hosted on Mariavi's servers. With commands it can be set up to stream certain subreddit's posts to channels (that it will create) and use Reddify to ensure that the bot's moderator status on other subreddits isn't abused.

Links

Contributors

The awesome people that worked on this bot and its idea to make it a reality!