I used code from a github repo to make a lemmy repost bot from a reddit sub.
I tested it out, it seemed OK. So I let it run over night.
When I got back I found out it had been posting the same thing over and over again every few minutes. The account was banned for spam. But in the meantime it was very annoying to people. Also, there are a bunch of posts that can’t be removed because it’s impossible to remove federated stuff.
Is there a responsible way to test this stuff?
I don’t want to make spam, be annoying, etc. I feel bad about the spam bot.
Also, don’t let it run against the live system the first time. Implement a “dry run” option which doesn’t post to Lemmy, but writes to a file or something similar. This way you can make sure nothing goes wrong in the parts aside from the Lemmy integration.
I was going to add this but figured I had already given too many points. This is the way, though.