I have written an HTML chat scraper in Python for the LOCALS** platform to record data from the chat rooms embedded as a post feature. Creation was motivated by the absolute degeneracy in the Nick Rekieta community (quickly becoming one of the most interesting cows of the year) in the first 3 months of this year. It led to a lot of laughs.
For a while, the dev team responded directly to block the bot, but their implementation was sloppy and ineffectual. I was worried for a time that releasing the code might allow them to block it, but with the implosion of the the Rekieta LOCALS community (down from 200-300 regular active users to a mere 20-30 recently), this is less of a concern, so I have decided to release the source.
The program is not the most elegant, and still has a few issues and needs some QoL and automation improvement (as noted within the commenting in the source), but it works reliably. With the opening of the Grift Wars board, I decided that if LOCALS becomes a platform used by cows on the right of American politics, it was best to make the tool available to other farmers. As of this moment, I believe that Ethan Ralph is the only other cow that uses the platform, but who knows what might transpire.
Feel free to make your own changes, optimisation tweaks, and laugh at spaghetti code. I would just ask for a small credit in your derivative code if you use it. I toyed with the idea of a Git for it and made a repository, but in the end that seemed like a lot of extra work for what would probably be mostly static code.
**For those not in the know, LOCALS is a right-wing US Patreon alternative owned by the similar right-wing YouTube alternative Rumble parent company.
