basedcount_bot

Bonus based to whoever can guess who he is modeled after. Hint: relevant in 1945 and later.

Users can now add their test results from politicalcompass.com using the new command /myCompass followed by a full URL from a test result page from politicalcompass.org. The bot will only reply to comments in PCM or direct messages.

Today was a very exciting update~

Previously, pills were stored as a single long string of characters per user. Pills were separated in the string by commas, which caused loads of bugs and problems. This system was born of my lack of experience in software development at the time and the fact that the bot was running on a raspberry pi and I wanted to use the least taxing system possible.

As of today, pills are now saved as individual objects with all sorts of data tacked onto them, including the user who gifted them, comment URL, and date. This will effectively allow users to search their (or another user's) pill history and see where those pills came from, however that search function sti

It shouldn't be too long. Apologies for missed baseds and pills!

Dearest friends, Romans, countrymen, libtards, monkes, temporarily-embarrassed future billionaires, cummies, breadline attendees, [redacted], closeted furries, flag-molesting patriots, attack helicopters, and people from all corners of the political compass,

…everyone except for the unflaired heretics, that is,

As you know, the basedcount_bot has recently had some… growing pains. Let’s just say it was in and out of the gulag, the effects of which were felt across PCM. But you know what they say, if you can't beat the authority, then make your own website somewhere else where you can be the authority. And so that's what we did.

Introducing [https://basedcoun

basedcount.com is a new website with the goal of hosting basedcount info in a location that can't as easily leave the bot open to report spam. The formatting of replies will need to be worked on, and currently mobile users will have a hard time accessing the site from the bot's comments, but the near future will bring many QoL improvements.

If you wish to see your based count or the count of any user, you may go to basedcount.com/u/[username] or use the website itself to search.

As you may know, the bot has recently recovered from a 7-day suspension, but that was only the most recent in a line of shorter bans that are the result of mass reporting of the bot's comments. The bot has won the appeal and managed to get the suspensions overturned, so it's likely just Reddit's automatic system. This is not due to the mods of PCM, but likely the hard work of some losers exploiting a quirk of Reddit. In particular, the pills lists have been a point of contention as well as a security concern that has been difficult to moderate.

Despite the bot being flaired as authcenter, I am libleft/left and believe in freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and I only moderate to pr

The bot is now on a stable platform that it should be able to run completely automatically on for several years. I am now confident that the bot won't have any rollback issues any longer, and in fact it should run better than ever. Thank you to everyone who helped me get it off the ground.

If you lost any counts/pills during these last few weeks, I'm offering a one-time manual fix to the dataBased per qualifying user. To qualify, please follow the directions below and submit a comment to this post:

1. The dates of the missed baseds/pills must be between October 20-October 28. I will also consider lost data for October 28-November 8, though rollback instances between these dates wer

The main discussion regarding the bot's status is now happening on Discord. Feel free to come by and offer your input. https://discord.gg/C8pwpJEF

Thanks again to everyone for the help! It's possible the bot is still broken, but we will only really know in about a day if it rolls back again to Oct 20 or not. The plan is to then move the bot to a more stable system for maintaining the dataBased.

EDIT: I've gotten a lot of great answers and a lot of help. Currently the main discussion is happening over on the discord channel, so feel free to stop over and join the push to getting this bot back on track! Thanks again to all the help!

. . .

As you probably are aware, the bot has been broken for the last several days. This is due to my yet-unsuccessful attempt at migrating the bot to a cloud server (Heroku) from my home server.

The issue specifically has to do with the fact that Heroku servers reset every day, randomly between every 21 and 27 hours. The bot saves the dataBased locally in a json file, which is lost in each shutdown as Heroku doesn't allow for long term local stor

Sorry for the terrible rollbacks these last few days, everyone. This bot is really the only public code that I maintain, so every issue/error requires me to tackle a steep learning curve of unknown unknowns.

The bot has rolled back daily to October 20th due to errors migrating to the new server, so no based counts or pills have been counted since then. The good news is that it might be fixed! The bad news is I won't truly know until it makes it through the next day. Please let me know if you experience any new rollbacks after the time of this post.

And as always, if you have skills coding and would like to help maintain the bot or improve it somehow, feel free to hop on over to my discord