I don't like trawling through email lists that I'm not taking part in, but I like reading what smart people have to say about technical things.

This project mirrors mailing lists on subreddits, to make it easier to browse and read messages. You can see it in action with the bitcoin-development mailing list on r/bitcoin_devlist.

To achieve the goal, I've created a Django app with the following components:

1. A miner that consumes the mailing list from within a Django management shell command and saves the data to Django models.
2. Another Django management command that posts top-level messages to the subreddit as submissions.
3. One last Django management command that posts comments to their relevant submissions on the subreddit.

1. Move Reddit authentication to OAuth: https://www.reddit.com/comments/2ujhkr/

1. Install virtualenvwrapper
2. mkvirtualenv blackbart
3. Clone the blackbart directory w/ something like git clone https://github.com/kvnn/blackbart.git
4. Go into the blackbart directory in your terminal
5. pip install -r requirements.txt
6. Set up a database and include the connection info in .env
7. python manage.py makemigrations
8. python manage.py migrate
9. Create your subreddit, and include the credential info in .env
10. python manage.py mine
11. python manage.py submissions_to_reddit
12. python manage.py comments_to_reddit

This is mandatory, as some Django and Reddit (praw) settings are expected to be stored here. See .env_sample for a starting point. Note that DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE should be changed if you want to put in a production, or whatever, settings file.

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="blackbart.settings.dev"
export BASE_API_URL="http://127.0.0.1:8001"
export REDDIT_BITCOIN_DEV_SUBREDDIT="bitcoin_devlist"
export REDDIT_BITCOIN_DEV_UA='bitcoin-dev blackbart by /u/kvnn'
export REDDIT_BITCOIN_DEV_USERNAME="bitcoin-devlist-bot"
export REDDIT_BITCOIN_DEV_PW="my_stupid_password"
export DB_ENGINE="django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2"
export DB_NAME="postgres_db_name"
export DB_HOST="127.0.0.1"
export DB_PORT="5432"
export DB_USERNAME="postgres_username"
export DB_PASSWORD="postgres_password"

If you fork this and change the name, do a global search & replace for "blackbart". There are some config files with the app name, like manage.py and settings/init.py.

I've included an api and some endpoints for convenience after running the miner. After running the miner, I like to visit /api/v1.0/messages/top-level/new/ to see new top-level messages and /api/v1.0/messages/new/ to see all new messages. I then visit them again after running the reddit-submission-submitter and the reddit-comment-submitter.

The miner app uses the mine Django management command to scrape the mailing list specified in .env. The scraping is done by a Scrapy spider in spiders.py, which sends data to pipelines.py for saving.

The distributor uses the submissions_to_reddit & comments_to_reddit Django management commands to post submissions and comments to the subreddit specified in .env, respectively.