A combination of boredom, inspiration, and a desire to keep my programming skills in check has led me to code a series of Twitter bots. These are Twitter accounts which automatically tweet every so often. They run on my personal computer, which is always turned on except when I lose power or something, so they don’t “go down” very often.
Well, sometimes Twitter deletes them when people complain about them… *cough*
The following bots are currently alive:
Content Type: Memetic crowdsourced humor
Posting Frequency: Up to one tweet per hour
Description: Foul Bachelor Frog is one of my favorite memes of all time, and one of the few memes which I actually enjoy. It is yet another one of those “modified Advice Dog” memes, featuring an image with a two-color starburst background, and two lines of text (one at the top, one at the bottom). However, instead of giving questionable advice like Advice Dog, the Foul Bachelor Frog describes activities which may be enjoyed by a stereotypical male bachelor. They tend to be, well, quite foul. One common theme is that the Foul Bachelor Frog likes to “blast things with piss” for some reason. Anyway, this bot reads the Foul Bachelor Frog page at Meme Generator, grabs the text of the latest user-created Foul Bachelor Frog image, and posts it as a tweet with the #FoulBachelorFrog hashtag. If it’s not able to do this for some reason (such as the website being down, or the text being too long), it simply does nothing, and tries again the next time it triggers.
Content Type: 100% pure derpiness
Posting Frequency: Up to five responses per hour, plus up to one random tweet per hour
Description: One day, I asked my Twitter followers to give me an idea for a new bot to make. Somebody said “Make a Bidoof bot!” I thought it was a wonderful idea, so I went ahead and did it. I really wish I remember who gave me the idea. Originally, Bidoof Bot only posted random tweets in Pokémon-style “Bidoof Language”, consisting of it saying randomized versions of “Bidoof”, which are generated by a context-free grammar. Basically, each tweet consists of one to three “Bidoof Sentences”, each of which consists of “doof” either repeated one to three times or “doof” with a random amount of o’s in the middle, and randomly begins with “bi” or not. Each sentence can end with random punctuation, or no punctuation, and in some random cases the word will be capitalized to make it look like it’s yelling. At first this was all it did, and it tweeted one to five times per hour. I eventually toned this down to once per hour. I then came up with the idea of making him tweet at people who use the word “Bidoof” in their tweets. I use the Twitter Search API to search for mentions of Bidoof, and have Bidoof tweet at them with a random Bidoof tweet. Similar to Sodomy Bot, this bot keeps a list of who it has tweeted at and will not tweet at the same person twice; however, this list is reset after only 100 tweets, so it will occasionally tweet at the same person twice, just never twice in a row and there will always be a good deal of time before it tweets at somebody it’s already tweeted at.
Content Type: Prehistoric philosophy
Posting Frequency: Up to one tweet per hour
Deep questions… this bot is all about Philosoraptor, and he’s all about the deep questions, man. Well, for the most part. Lots of the time it just spouts random nonsense, sometimes not even in English. In terms of programming, this is just a clone of the Foul Bachelor Frog bot, except it looks at the Philosoraptor page on Meme Generator instead of the Foul Bachelor Frog page, grabbing the latest Philosoraptor quote and adding the #Philosoraptor hashtag to the quote before attempting to tweet it.
Content Type: Abuse
Posting Frequency: Up to five responses per hour, plus up to one random tweet per hour
This is a line-for-line clone of Bidoof Bot, with two important differences: it is Pikachu, so it spouts off random Pika-speak; and it is fat, so about 2/3 of the time it will make a comment about eating, or wanting to eat, or looking for food. It may even check its blood sugar level! (Yes, it’s diabetic.)
Content Type: The Fucking Moon Man
Posting Frequency: One random tweet per hour, plus unlimited real-time responses to anyone who tweets directly at him
He’s back, bitches!
I also have a small army of simple “retweet” bots (I’ve honestly lost track of how many are out there in the wild). Want to make one of your own? It’s very simple, and doesn’t even require any programming skills! Even better, the bots run out there on the Cloud, not on your personal computer – so they never go down, and don’t take up resources on your machine! Check out this little tutorial I whipped up.
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