Creating ExistentialRickBot, probably the silliest Redditbot yet

So I'd written SchmeckleBot, a simple bot that converts currency from schmeckles to USD. But I decided to go even simpler, still in the theme of Rick and Morty (if you loved Futurama watch this!).

In the pilot episode, when Morty sees something during a chase scene that causes an existential crisis, Rick quickly snaps him out of it with the pithy quote 'Don't think about it!'.

It should be immediately obvious that a reddit bot needs to exist and reply with that quote whenever an existential question is asked on the r/rickandmorty subreddit. And thus was born ExistentialRickBot.

The core logic is dead simple, if an existential question is posted, respond with an existential answer.

questions = ['why', 'happen', 'think'] # Match if any of these are found in message
def isExistentialQuestion(message):
  return '?' in message and any([q in message.lower() for q in questions])

def getAnswerToExistentialQuestion():
  return "The answer is don't think about it."

You'd think something as simple as this would have less of an impact on a community than a more complex bot like Tensorflow chessbot or SchmeckleBot, but no. ExistentialRickBot has gained the most karma points the quickest by far. Here is one of its responses

---

Why is this sub trending? by mattcrick in rickandmorty

ExistentialRickBot360 points 

The answer is don't think about it.

---

^{I am a bot | what is my purpose}

---

We can dive a little deeper into the reddit python API (PRAW) logic. We have a main loop running that checks submissions in real time (praw helpfully provides a yielding stream). For each submission we check if the title is an existential question, and if so, we generation a response and reply.

while running:
  # get submission stream
  try:
    submissions = submission_stream(r, subreddit, limit=submission_read_limit)
    # for each submission
    for submission in submissions:
      count += 1
      # print out some debug info
      logInfoPerSubmission(submission, count, count_actual)

      # Skip if already processed
      if submission.id in already_processed:
        continue
      
      # check if submission title is a question
      if isExistentialQuestion(submission.title):
        # generate response
        msg = "%s%s" % (getAnswerToExistentialQuestion(), getResponseFooter())
        # respond, keep trying till success
        while True:
          try:
            print("> %s - Adding comment to %s: %s" % (datetime.now(), submission.id, submission))
            submission.add_comment(msg)
            # update & save list
            already_processed.add(submission.id)
            saveProcessed(already_processed)
            count_actual += 1
            # Wait after submitting to not overload
            waitWithComments(300)
            break
          except praw.errors.AlreadySubmitted as e:
            print("> %s - Already submitted skipping..." % datetime.now())
            break
          except praw.errors.RateLimitExceeded as e:
            print("> {} - Rate Limit Error for commenting on {}, sleeping for {} before retrying...".format(datetime.now(), submission.id, e.sleep_time))
            waitWithComments(e.sleep_time)

We keep track of submissions we've previously responded to in a set, stored in a text file (we can regenerate easily enough by doing a search for all responses by the bot using praw as well).

Check out some of it's most recent posts from its user page: ExistentialRickBot

Source code on Github