Reddit USL Soccer Standings Sidebar Updater

Update the sidebar of a subreddit with the Western Conference standings from uslsoccer.com.

Requires username, password, client_id, and client_secret for the Reddit account the bot will run under.

Also requires the account to have moderator status in the subreddit of which the sidebar will be updated.

Dependencies

• Python 3
• Requests

You can have the dependencies automatically installed by executing pip install -r requirements.txt, although there is only one dependency. You will obviously have to obtain Python and pip manually.

Setup

Reddit Account

Go the Apps tab of your reddit account preferences.

Give it a name of whatever you want - you can change this later - and a redirect URL of http://127.0.0.1:6504/authorize_callback. You won't need to use this for this bot, it just requires this field to be filled out. Also make sure to mark it as a Script.

You'll then see the ID and secret of the application. You enter these in the client_id and client_secret fields. They are marked red and green respectively.

You will also need to change all the highlighted fields in the config.json accordinly. You should have text before the forward slash & version number in the user_agent field be the same as the app name you created.

That's all the setup required for the app. You can now exeute the script and it should work.

Configuration

The configuration file - config.json looks like this:

{
    "client_id": "",
    "client_secret": "",
    "user_agent": "SomethingUnique/1.0 by /u/Rascal_Two",
    "username": "",
    "password": "",
    "subreddit": "SaintLouisFC",
    "check_rate": 600
}

• client_id is the client ID of the reddit application setup above.
• client_secret is the cllicne secret of the reddit application setup above.
• user_agent is what reddit identifies the bot as. The more unique this is the better, as common user agents have their rates limited.
• username is the username of the Reddit account the bot will run under.
• password is the password of the Reddit account the bot will run under.
• subreddit is the name of the subreddit sidebar that's being updated.
• check_rate is the rate - in seconds - that the bot will update the sidebar.

Sidebar Requirements

The sidebar must have these two tags(?) in this order. They must be as shown, seperated from the rest of the sidebar by a blank newline. Everything within these two tags will be replaced and set to the table.

[](/begin_table)

[](/end_table)

Explanation

When the bot is first created it loads the configuration data from the config.json file. It then sends the username, password, client_id, and client_secret to the Reddit API to get a access token. This access token lasts 60 minutes, and is used to do actions as the reddit account.

This access token is automatically refreshed, and I have personaly been able to run the bot for 5 hours without any errors.

Every minute it outputs a message stating it's uptime. It also checks if it's time to update the table. If it it, then it scrapes this site.

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The site requires some more client interaction the most, so the scraper must make the AJAX request that is usually made by the browser manually. It obtains both Eastern and Western standings, although the eastern standings are ignored.

The HTML tags are then scraped away and the data is extracted. All values are extracted, although only some are returned.

The data is lastly formated for reddit before finally being returned.

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The text within the above mentoned tags on the sidebar is then replaced with the new table data, along with the current time at the bottom of the table.

The last thing needed is to send the new subreddit settings to reddit.