Twitter has revoked API access for #CheapBotsDoneQuick, killing thousands of creative bots & even making it impossible to login to retrieve source for lost bots.

Luckily I ported my own crappy #CBDQ twitter bot over to Mastodon last week via #CheapBotsTootSweet. The flow of nonsensical #BuffyTheVampireSlayer plots will not be interrupted:
@buffyplotbot

#bots #CreativeBots #TwitterBots #CBTS #buffy

Tempted to make a Sherlock bot, but I'm not sure what to do other than quoting the books. Is that enough? Maybe mix in some trivia facts? #sherlock #cbts

As the roster of active #CBTS bots has grown, we were running into some traffic jams with periodicity overlap.

There's work to be done on actually parallelizing but for now I just throttled some very common bottleneck causers and will hope for the best.

Something is wrong with the #CBTS server, apologies for the inconvenience but I will look into it urgently once I'm done with my day job today.

@boodoo Hello! I'd like to use #CBTS to run a bot account that posts images with alt text, but I can't get it to work. My coding knowledge extends just far enough to do basic formatting for an AO3 fic, so I'm sure I've just missed something obvious.

I managed to get it to stop telling me I had syntax errors by going through some of the tutorials, but when I tried to post a test toot, it didn't add the image. Do you have any guidance? Here is the code I used:

{
"origin": "Test",
"img": "https://i.imgur.com/cVgKZCX.jpeg",
"alt": "Alt text goes here"
}

Thank you for making this tool! I'm excited for it!

new known #CBTS behavior difference from #CBDQ: if you're hosting image assets on imgur, please source them as https://i.imgur.com/someURL because leaving out that "i." subdomain is causing the backend renderer to choke on a redirect. 🤖🙏

<https://github.com/BooDoo/CheapBotsTootSweet/issues/24>

Added a few more questions to @pollbot - about time I guess. It's also about time to add new photos to @blackjoy, although I had already mentioned I was considering porting it over to python and self-hosting it, seeing as #CBTS can only go so far to allow you to customize content. #bots

I am not coming up with an elegant solution for visualizing focal points in the #CBTS frontend tonight, but I have poked at it enough that I'm confident Tomorrow Me will have some stroke of genius.

Pushing some #CBTS changes to production. I still do not have test plans. It'll probably be fine dwbi.

I have no idea why #CBTS frontend isn't working right now. Sorry!

#CBTS was down since early this morning for boring system upgrade reasons but should be back to its regular schedule now. I'll probably break something again soon to add support for image focus points, fair warning.

Emoji work now. Support for image focal points is the only other significant item on the roadmap and then updating the docs to reflect the changes. #CBTS

Alright, #CBTS is finally using a headless Chromium to render its SVGs. Didn't solve every problem I thought it would (fonts, emoji), but hey: you can actually set opacity and do filter:hue-rotate() and stuff with CSS now!

Taking a snapshot of the #CBTS server before trying to push the overdue change to headless Chromium for SVG rendering in place of PhantomJS because storage is cheap and reverting system-level changes manually is not.

@boodoo @muffinista I copy/pasted the code I used for the Twitter version of @selfhelp_ebooks and it works fine in the #CBTS preview, but the images wont load as soon as the post is live. I think it may be because the images need a moment to load and CBTS/Mastodon posts too fast for that to complete. Is there a way to delay it, say 5 seconds?

Sample: https://botsin.space/@selfhelp_ebooks/109557094547189988

Hey @boodoo could you help me figure out why @elonjet isn't posting on its own? Everything works fine when I post manually, but it won't post on its own when I set it to post on a schedule. #cbts #notanothersupportrequest

Source: https://cheapbotstootsweet.com/source/?url=https://brands.town/@elonjet

I finally made the one-line change that will remove all #cbts support requests from my DMs forever.

also I think I rolled out a fix for the #CBTS issue where bots with replies enabled would start re-replying to statuses they'd already answered. It was a quick fix and untested though so only time will tell.

I made @aastriiche to remind everyone that natural language is context-sensitive (and that Swiss German is cool)

#newBot #botALLY #CBTS #linguistics

Generated quickly in SVG using feImage filters to reduce the number of elements drawn. @ifs will be able to do a lot more iterations when this functionality is enabled in #CBTS