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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

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***" 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 Sipder

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

  #giveaway.py
  def has_bad_words()
  
    bad_words = []
    #provide the list of bad_words in function has_bad_words() 
    #which will be matched for as sub-strings in the Summary provided for entering giveaway
  
    bad_titles = []
    #provide the list of bad_titles in the function has_bad_words()
    #which will be matched word for word in the Book Title
  

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

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

• 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 : Any reaction to the use of the bot is upon the user and the user alone. Use at your own discretion.