MediumBot

Increase your likelihood to grow your Medium account by viewing articles based on your followed tags by liking articles and leaving comments on articles.

About

It’s hard to start out creating content with a small audience. Interacting with user’s who have similar interests is the easiest way to build a social media platform but it is a long time consuming process to get there. Using the MediumBot you can drive user interaction how ever you want. Using the bot for an hour yeilded 15 notifications and 8 of those were followers.

Requirements

MediumBot was developed under Pyhton 2.7.

Before you can run the bot, you will need to install a few Python dependencies.

Note: Python 2.7.9 and later (on the python2 series), and Python 3.4 and later include pip by default, so you may have pip already. Otherwise, you can install easy_install sudo apt-get install python-setuptools to install pip sudo easy_install pip.

• BeautifulSoup4, for parsing html: pip install BeautifulSoup4
• lxml, to assist with BeautifulSoups’ parsing: pip install lxml
• Selenium, for browser automation: pip install Selenium If you plan to use Firefox (or Iceweasel) you don’t need anything more. (Note: you actually may need to install GeckoDriver if your FireFox install is fairly new)

For Chrome, first get the webdriver then put it in the same folder than the bot if you are on Windows, or in the /usr/bin folder if you are on OS X.

PhantomJS:

• On Windows, download the binary from the official website and put it in the same folder than the bot.
• On OS X Yosemite, the binary provided by the PhantomJS crew doesn’t work (selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: ‘Can not connect to GhostDriver’). You can either compile it by yourself or download the binary provided by the awesome eugene1g. Then put it in the /usr/bin folder.
• It’s the same for Raspbian : compile it and put it in the /usr/bin folder or download the binary provided by the awesome fg2it.

If you want to built your own binaries, here is the build instructions for PhantomJS.

Configuration

Before you run the bot, edit the configuration portion of the script. This will include your account login information (email, password, and service your login is through, etc.) and other logical values to make the bot more of your own. It’s that simple!

# Configure constants here
EMAIL = 'youremail@gmail.com'
PASSWORD = 'password'
LOGIN_SERVICE = 'Google, Twitter, or Facebook'
DRIVER = 'Chrome, Firefox/Iceweasel, or PhantomJS'
LIKE_POSTS = True
RANDOMIZE_LIKING_POSTS = True
MAX_LIKES_ON_POST = 50 # only like posts with less than X posts.
COMMENT_ON_POSTS = False
RANDOMIZE_COMMENTING_ON_POSTS = True
COMMENTS = ['Great read!', 'Good work keep it up!', 'Really enjoyed the content!', 'Very interesting!']
ARTICLE_BLACK_LIST = ['Sex', 'Drugs', 'Child Labor']
FOLLOW_USERS = False
RANDOMIZE_FOLLOWING_USERS = True
UNFOLLOW_USERS = False
RANDOMIZE_UNFOLLOWING_USERS = False
UNFOLLOW_USERS_BLACK_LIST = ['DontUnFollowMe']
USE_RELATED_TAGS = True
ARTICLES_PER_TAG = 250
VERBOSE = True

Run

Once you have installed the required dependencies and edited the configuration constants, you can run the bot.

If you would prefer to use the GUI to select your bot options through a GUI instead of editing a file make sure you are in the correct directory and run the MediumBotGUI using the following command: python MediumBotGUI.py You will be prompted with a Gui as shown below:

If you’d rather not use the GUI make sure you are in the correct directory and run the following command: python MediumBot.py

Then, after choosing your favorite browser the bot will start visiting articles based on your tags and start liking and commenting articles or following and unfollowing users increase your visibility on Medium.

Output