Build a Reddit Moderator Bot With Standard Library + Code.xyz in 10 Minutes

Build a Reddit Moderator Bot With Standard Library, Code.xyz, and Node.js in 10 Minutes

If you’re a subreddit moderator, chances are you’ve received requests from community members to delete an inappropriate comment or ban an ill-mannered user. But it’s 2018 going on 2019 — we’re in the midst of the biggest tech era and spoiled with things like AI, automation and bots. We no longer need to perform menial tasks like monitoring subreddits. Together, we’re going to build a Reddit bot that will automatically check a subreddit for flagged comments in 3 easy steps.

Whether you have no programming knowledge or 15 years of professional experience, you’ll be able to deploy this bot with Standard Library, the API development and hosting platform, in under 10 minutes.

If you’re not familiar with Standard Library, we’re a serverless platform that enables everyone (yes, everyone! Calling all PMs, designers, marketing teams, sales people, oh and engineers… 🙋) to build, ship, and integrate scalable APIs in a matter of seconds. With the help of our online editor, Code.xyz, you can do all of this right from your browser.

Requirements

• Reddit moderator account (for the subreddit you’d like to monitor)
• Standard Library account (free)

Step 1: Get the Reddit bot template

Estimated time: 30 seconds

Head over to Code.xyz in your browser and select reddit-moderator-bot by @eileenzhong (that’s me! 🤓👋) in the Community API Sources tab:

Name your API:

Once done, you’ll conveniently land in Code.xyz (Standard Library’s in-browser text editor) with the Reddit bot project code.

Step 2: Copy and paste

Estimated time: 2-5 minutes

This next step involves expert knowledge of the copy-and-paste skill to set some required environment variables. You’ll notice there are three sets of variables listed in your env.json file: local, dev, and release. We’ll be deploying our code to the dev environment, so we only need to worry about the dev variables for this tutorial!

All fields are found in env.json:

To retrieve your STDLIB_LIBRARY_TOKEN, right click between the quotation marks and select “Insert Library Token…”:

Right click to access this context menu

Keys prefaced withREDDIT_-* can be found on Reddit (REDDIT_USERNAME and REDDIT_PASSWORD are your moderator account’s username and password, respectively).

If you don’t already have a Reddit app, register for one here with your moderator account:

Copy the REDDIT_CLIENT_ID and REDDIT_SECRET_KEY:

Paste both into env.json:

When your env.json file is properly filled out like the above screenshot, the bot is ready for some preliminary testing.

Fill out the required parameters (definitions and screenshots below):

Parameter definitions

subreddit: the name of the subreddit you are moderating
threshold: what score do you want the comment to have in order to perform the requested action? 
allowBanPermission: true (allow ban requests) / false (ignore ban requests)

Click Debug to launch the parameter editor

Then click the “Run” button, which will do 2 things: deploy the API and execute it.

Custom parameters

Congratulations, your bot is live! 😎 🎉 🎊

When you hit “Run”, your bot scanned through your subreddit for any comments flagged with !delete or !ban and reacted accordingly by starting a vote!

Step 3: Set it and forget it

Estimated time: 1 minute

Schedule the main function as a task

Now, the final step is to set a task to automate this process and have your bot check your subreddit every few minutes for flagged comments. You can do this in Code.xyz by scheduling a task, which will automatically execute the API you just created according to a schedule of your choosing.

Suggestion: depending on subreddit traffic, you might increase or decrease the frequency of bot invocation. A good start is to have the bot do a scan once every 5 minutes.

Once you click the “Schedule Task” button in the bottom right corner, your Reddit bot will scan r/{subreddit} to reply to any new !ban/!delete requests and perform these tasks on any comments that meet the score threshold according to the schedule you have chosen.

That’s it! 🌟 Now imagine… if it was this quick and painless to deploy a Reddit moderator bot, what else can Standard Library do for you? Feel free to reach out with any ideas or questions: [email protected].

Eileen is a software engineer at Standard Library.