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Ask HN: Are bots allowed on HN?
3 points by azdle on Feb 24, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
I wrote a little bot that watches for links that are rising quickly and submits them to archive.is just in case they're not on servers that'll be able to handle the load. I just did this to scratch an itch myself, but it'd probably be useful to others too.

I'm thinking about rewriting it so it works better, would it be helpful (and allowed) if I were to make it post a comment on any submissions that it notices have gone down after it archived them?

I didn't see anything in the rules that talks about bots, but I also don't see them used, so I figured I'd check.

Yes
1 point
No
1 point



For this kind of questions it's better to email the mods directly to hn@ycombinator.com , because the thread pass unnoticed.

I think that a bot that post to every thread will be downvoted to oblivion and then flagged. If it only post in a the few threads that it will provide an useful service, perhaps it may be welcome ...


If it's using the API, automation would be the expected behavior.


I'm not actually sure what you mean by that.

It is currently using the firebase api.




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