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[Python] GitHub Follower Bot

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Description
This is a GitHub Follower Bot made inside of a Django application. Management of the bot is done inside of Django's default admin center. The bot itself runs in the background of the Django application.

 

The bot works as the following.

 

  • Runs as a background task in the Django application.
  • Management of bot is done in the Django application's web admin center.
  • After installing, you must add a super user via Django (e.g. python3 manage.py createsuperuser).
  • Navigate to the admin web center and add your target user (the user who will be following others) and seeders (users that start out the follow spread).
  • After adding the users, add them to the target and seed user list.
  • New/least updated users are parsed first up to the max users setting value followed by a random range wait scan time.
  • A task is ran in the background for parsed users to make sure they're being followed by target users.
  • Another task is ran in the background to retrieve target user's followers and if the Remove Following setting is on, it will automatically unfollow these specific users for the target users.
  • Another task is ran that checks all users a target user is following and unfollows the user after x days (0 = doesn't unfollow).
  • Each follow and unfollow is followed by a random range wait time which may be configured.

 

My Motives
A few months ago, I discovered a few GitHub users following over 100K users who were obviously using bots. At first I was shocked because I thought GitHub was against massive following users, but after reading more into it, it appears they don't mind. This had me thinking what if I started following random users as well. Some of these users had a single GitHub.io project that received a lot of attention and I'd assume it's from all the users they were following. I decided to try this. I wanted to see if it'd help me connect with other developers and it certainly did/has! Personally, I haven't used a bot to achieve this, I was actually going through lists of followers from other accounts and following random users. As you'd expect, this completely cluttered my home page, but it also allowed me to discover new projects which was neat in my opinion.

 

While this is technically 'spam', the good thing I've noticed is it certainly doesn't impact the user I'm followiing much other than adding a single line in their home page stating I'm following them (or them receiving an email stating this if they have that on). Though, I could see this becoming annoying if many people/bots started doing it (perhaps GitHub could add a user setting that has a maximum following count of a user who can follow them or receive notifications when the user follows).

 

I actually think it's neat this is allowed so far because it allows others to discover your projects. Since I have quite a few networking projects on this account, I've had some people reach out who I followed stating they found my projects neat because they aren't into that field.

 

I also wouldn't support empty profiles made just for the purpose of mass following.

 

GitHub Repository

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