Goodreads-Giveaway-BOT

An automated Bot that enters the User onto Giveaways on Goodreads using Scrapy web-crawler.

Prerequisites

User

• The user needs to have a Goodreads Account.
• The user needs to have atleast one shipping address saved beforehand.

Installation

To run the bot, Scrapy needs to be installed on the system.

To install Scrapy using conda, run:

$ conda install -c conda-forge scrapy

Alternatively, installation through PyPI:

$ pip install Scrapy

Usage

Run the crawler

$ scrapy crawl giveaway -a username="***email_id***" -a password="***password***"

This will start the bot with User logging in using the Email ID and password provided as arguments. Once logged in, the spider will start, traversing through the Giveaway pages : Ending soon , Most requested, Popular authors and the Latest giveaways

Features

• Asychronous calls to pages, meaning faster crawling

• Verbose Output during execution of Spider

• Option to Ignore giveaways based on selective keywords as specified by user

  • Blacklist according to the title

  # blacklisted_titles.txt
  # provide the list of blacklisted words that should be checked in the titles
  # provide each word line-wise
  # Ex:
  word1
  word2
  word3
  

  • Blacklist according to the description

  # blacklisted_words.txt
  # provide the list of blacklisted words that should be checked in the decription
  # provide each word line-wise
  # Ex:
  word11
  word12
  word13
  

• Store the Entered Giveaways list in file : #EnteredGiveaways.txt

• Store the Rejected Giveaways list in file : #RejectedGiveaways.txt

• When the Giveaway is being entered, the "Also add this book to my to-read shelf." checkbox is un-ticked.

• Scrapy Settings :

  # Obey robots.txt rules
  ROBOTSTXT_OBEY = True
  
  # Enable and configure the AutoThrottle extension
  AUTOTHROTTLE_ENABLED = True
  
  #Enable Cookies that are received and keeps track of cookies sent by servers, 
  #and sends them back on subsequent requests
  #COOKIES_ENABLED = True
  

Disclaimer : The bot only Enters the user onto Giveaway, and does not guarantee that the user will win the Giveaway. Any reaction upon the use of the bot is upon the user and the user alone. Use at your own discretion.