I've created a bot that reposts bapcsalescanada from the subreddit's RSS feed. It is posted at an interval of 5mins. I am currently testing it on a test community to see if it works as intended; once it works well i will open source the code, then I can move it to post on this community if @RandomDude agrees.
I was previously tempted to make one, but was discouraged by this comment.
Thank you, I think it's a valuable tool for this sub while it's still in its infancy compared to the contributor and subscriber count of r/bapcsalescanada.
RandomDude’s last comment was from a month ago, so you might not get a response if you wait for their approval. You could give it a week or so to see if there’s a response and activate the bot if you don’t get one. The community is dead anyway if nothing changes, so there’s nothing to lose by trying.
Using a bot for a period of time to generate activity and then disabling once engagement is sustained, vs sticking to humans but have zero engagement... I think it's pretty clear where the value is. Thanks for creating that bot :)
@RandomDude please!
Edit: another thought, given that this is the fediverse, nothing really prevents the creation of a community (in this instance or another) that has the bot, and experiment to see which approach is most effective.
Edit 2: I just realized, if it's based on RSS, it won't auto update if the past is deleted or marked as expired right?
Unfortunately it won't detect deleted or expired posts. Perhaps there's clever tricks to check periodically if a post is still alive on Reddit via a get request, but that'd be expensive to implement and hard to test on the reddit side; however it's worth trying when we get there :)
I wish there was a way to see the posts on Reddit, and have them show along side posts in Lemmy but I also would prefer it to be interacting with real people on here. I think that's what I like more about the fediverse, the people here actually care.
This GitHub repo seems pretty straightforward enough to repurpose for bapcsalescanada purposes, to mirror r/bapcsalescanada posts to this community via it's rss feeds...
In addition to the ongoing bot suggestion, a simple way to contribute is to post the deals you find here instead of the other site. I still check the other site every once and a while, but any good deals I find myself (that aren't on the other site yet) will be posted here and only here.