Dibsomator

A Telegram bot for automating buying items in the Otaniemi Buy and Sell group

---

Setup:

1. Setup a virtual cloud instance if you wish the bot to run over the clock

2. Clone this repository to your local or virtual machine

3. Get API keys from my.telegram.org/apps

It is recommended to use an account different from your main account to avoid losing access to it in case the bot malfunctions

4. In the folder containing the code of the bot, create a file named .env and give the following environment variables the values of your Telegram credentials

    TELETHON_ID = "<your app ID goes here>"
    TELETHON_HASH = "<your hash goes here>"

5. From the account you run dibsomator from, join the @aaltomarketplace group

If you wish to recive notifications to a different account than what the bot is run on, make sure to send a message to the account the bot uses, otherwise Telegram will not let it send messages to you

6. Specify the bot what to look for in the bot_config.json file

You can find an example bot_config.json file, but here is a description of what each key means:

• "keywords": These are the words the bot is looking for in messages
• "max_price": The maximum price in euros the bot will dib to
• "dibs_to_unknown_price": If set to true, the bot will dib to items matching the keywords even if it can not figure out what the price is
• "notify_only": If set to false, the bot will write dibs to the item in the group, if set to a Telegram tag, the bot will not write dibs and will only send a notification to the given user
• "active": If false, the bot will not dib or notify users about the given item. Automatically set to false after dibbing
• "notify_about_free": If set to true, the user will get notification of every free to take item
• "send_notification_to": The bot will send all notifications to this user
• "group_tag": The tag of the group the bot checks for messages in. You likely need "@aaltomarketplace".

7. If you run the bot from a Linux virtual machine, you can run the Bash scripts start.sh to start the bot and stop.sh to stop it. If you run it locally, just run the Python script main.py

Possible future features:

• Filter by pickup location
• Use GPT3 to check if what is being sold is what we think it is
• Beer as currency
• Not all fields are mandatory in bot_config.json
• Telegram UI (bot can be configurated in telegram)
• Multi-user