Interest in OzBargain Telegram Bot

Lfoobarjohnnie on 04/02/2017 - 13:59
Last edited 04/02/2017 - 14:10 by 1 other user

Hi all,

Some people consume the fantastic deals at OzBargain via the RSS feed. I wrote a telegram bot that notifies me of the latest bargains according to my interests. For example, I'm in the market for new earphones so I add that as an interest and my slave…err I mean bot notifies me when he notices a deal on earphones.

I've been using it for a couple of weeks and it seems stable enough so was wondering if anybody else would find it useful so I can share. I did it because I needed it and as part of a bigger hobby project that I will announce when it matures a bit more.

Add aussieshopperbot on telegram if you'd like to play around. Happy to receive questions, feedback and critique.

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Comments

  • mskeggs on 04/02/2017 - 14:27
    +4

    https://www.itelegram.com/

    Looks kinda old fashioned. And the per character charges will quickly add up.
    I'm hoping to get a OzB->fax gateway going to harness that cutting edge, fully graphical technology.

  • KnownSystemError on 04/02/2017 - 15:08

    Sounds interesting. Can you give some basics on how this works? I have added in telegram but not sure what to do to get started ie add interests.

    • foobarjohnnie on 04/02/2017 - 15:14

      Sure. Basically, you have 3 visible commands /start, /latest and /listinterest and two commands to /addinterest and /removeinterest.
      /latest will show you the "latest" deals since you last checked or from the beginning of the day so as not to spam you with a lot of messages. /listinterest lists your currently registered interests. /addinterest <interest> allows you to add a word as an interest for example /addinterest earphones. /removeinterest <interest> does the opposite. <interest> can also be a term such as "belkin plug"

      Your added interests are then matched with the titles of the deals that ozbargain gets. Currently, it only matches words or terms so not particularly smart but something i am hoping i can change soon.

      I should probably add some of this to the welcome message…

      • KnownSystemError on 04/02/2017 - 15:19

        Thanks heaps. Will give it a try. Thanks for sharing.

  • jackofspade on 04/02/2017 - 16:03
    +2

    Ozbargain already have Alerts.

  • firstworldproblems on 11/02/2017 - 16:03

    OP interesting idea — i have a telegram bot for my personal use as well.

    one thing i've noticed, however, is that not all the deals are accessible through the ozbargain RSS feed and that i have to supplement it by also scraping the live feed.

    • foobarjohnnie on 12/02/2017 - 10:03

      Right now I'm only matching against the titles, that is until I get some free time and get to make it a bit smarter. What do you find missing the rss feed?

      • firstworldproblems on 12/02/2017 - 18:27

        i think the RSS feed won't include ads, when the ads themselves contain a promotion just as good as a deal. i found this to be the case when searching for discounted prepaid starter kits and there was a mismatch between what was showing up on the website and what my bot was telling me.

        regarding searching: you should definitely search descriptions. using the prepaid starter kits as an example again, oftentimes good discounts will be tucked inside the weekly coles deals, even though the title may be about 50 cents off apples.

        • foobarjohnnie on 12/02/2017 - 18:57

          Thanks for the tip about the ads; I didn't know that. Searching within the whole text definitely is next on my todo list. I have a lot of ambitious plans for my bot…

        • scotty on 16/02/2017 - 10:46

          RSS feed won't include ads

          Neither will the live feed. Ads are just banners and are not part of the content.

          What happens with RSS feed is that the content is cached by up to 30 minutes. A deal can change quite dramatically in 30 minutes (yes, sometimes with a bit of drama) so what you see on the RSS feed (especially when you cache them yourself by ID) can be quite different from what you see on the site.

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