About five months ago I created a Hive bot called @proofofbrian. All it does is notify people if they mis-typed the #proofofbrain tag. It was really an exercise for me in writing something like that. All it does is leave a comment and a vote. I do include images of some famous Brians from Wikipedia to make it more fun. People seem to appreciate what it does and I think it gets a few laughs.
I am a bit wary in case I get caught mis-typing the tag too. At least peakd suggests some tags so I can just select it.
This week it notified the 300th person! That is a fair chunk of the active Hivers and some very established people got caught out. It only notifies each person once to avoid spamming by keeping a list of who was told. That is how I know how many comments it left. Some people even give the comments a vote, but it is just a tiny amount and it was not intended to earn for me.
This would not be possible without the beem Python library that gives you all the functions you need to work with the Hive blockchain. I just run the bot when I am using my home PC, so it will miss some cases. I have thought of running it on a Raspberry Pi, but beem was crashing. I need to look into that again.
You can see my code on Github. It is just a few lines plus some data for the image files and the tags it looks for. There may be some variants I have missed, but I made the list based on some queries for what was actually being used.
I ought to think about other apps I could write. I do have some scripts I use to find people for the #BritList. We have access to a huge amount of data on this blockchain, so there is lots of scope for analysing it. If people have suggestions of things that could be done then I may attempt to code them. It is all good programming practice for me.
Hive five!
