[ @TAEGIFICBOT ]
TAG MY BOT ON TWITTER & IT REPLIES WITH CUSTOM BTS FANFICTION RECS
Node.JS / Twitter API / Google Sheets / Axios / Cheerio / Firestore Database / Heroku Built in 2020
Let me explain
It all started when I tweeted complaining about how long it took to dig out good stories from the depths of Archive Of Our Own. For context, Archive of Our Own—or AO3—is a massive online fanfiction repository. Other Twitter users replied to my tweet in agreement, and I thought that if nobody’s building anything, I should probably do it myself. And with the help of two other fanfic enthusiasts, I was able to populate a spreadsheet with thousands of links to stories we'd all read and loved in the fandom. Since Archive of Our Own has no API to request data from, I built a web scraper that pulled the metadata of a story when given its url. All of that data was then stored in a realtime database on Firebase.
Next, I built a Twitter bot that would be triggered each time a user tagged it in a tweet. The bot would then pull links from the database and reply to the user. Users could request for stories with specific lengths, genres, pairings, tropes, completion statuses—they could even avoid stories with certain trigger warnings if they wanted to. They could also subscribe to receive daily fanfic recommendations in their inbox.
The bot’s no longer active. I eventually took it down when I stepped away from social media for personal reasons—but the code is still available on my Github. Feel free to check it out.
Github repo