I have opened 10 more or less helpful PRs, most address UI issues.
Lots of little JS patches.
They are small PRs, but still, 10 is quite a number IMO.

Have you seen such an image before? It explains an XSS polyglot.
That is a payload that works in more than 1 context: inside comments, inside of a tag, directly in javascript source etc.

The creation of these payloads is a hard, time-consuming problem that some associate with witchcraft as it is very hard to reason about how a certain payload is working.

So I've seen this article that teaches a computer to fund polyglot payloads: "Finding superhuman XSS polyglot payloads with Genetic Algorithms"

If you've created a group here before, have you ever wondered what's actually unlocked at tier 2?
I have because none of my groups is tier 2 yet... but I found out!

Recently I dug around in the ZapRead source again and found "ChangeShortDesc(int groupId, string newDesc)" in the GroupController.
This seems to edit be the text after the - , not the group name but some additional text. I always wondered if that is special to the Community group.

Looking through the source code I didn't find a check for tier 2... so 5 seconds later I tried to set my own with a simple requets in burp, something like like:

POST /Group/ChangeShortDesc HTTP/1.1
Host: www.zapread.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
__RequestVerificationToken: [...]
Content-Length: 35
Cookie: [...]

groupId=209&newDesc=Today I Learned

Easy, now my tier 0 group has a description!

I hate cliffhangers.

So I was playing with a bot that protects against spam.
Cuz, you know, I'm tired of seeing CPR ads here.

The idea was the following:
- join all groups to get notified about every post
- for each post make a spam check (this will be described later)
- comment that it is spam
- if group owner has added the bot as moderator: mark NSFW so users don't see the spam

This all sounds simple, if it wasn't for the spam checking part.

I did not find a free API, but even the paid ones I could try for free aren't really good.
The spam does get detected 100%, but there are many false positives.
Much crypto content I'd say is good content would be flagged.
Some APIs allow training, that would reduce the false positives after a while, but it is tedious, potentially a long term thing and not a great UX.
I wouldn't want my bot to mark (too many) things as spam and hide them behind a nswf wall. That wouldn't be worth it.

The next best thing I could do is a bot that NSFW's posts with negative rep or a report like commenting @antispambot or something similar.
I could also automatically flag them if they contain CPR, but then the next topic is spammed, so I'd ditch that.

And negative rep isn't a good criteria either, posts about alt coins would get blocked rather often ;)

Sadly, there's no simple solution for this. I think I only have 2 options: find, buy and train an API, or ditch this idea.

For now, I'll ditch this idea. I might find a good API one day or have a new idea, maybe not.

But 1 thing stuck with me this whole time: a bot that is added as moderator.
The only thing a mod can do is setting NSFW and Group Sticky.
My only idea for NSFW tags was spam and since I ditched that I'm currently exploring a bot that changes the group sticky daily.
Not extremely motivated for that though... but it's the second best idea yet. (Btw, third is an XKCD bot.)

This was uploaded just now, currently watching it, I guess it'll be awesome!

"The Cosmic Pi project aims to build the world's largest open source distributed cosmic ray telescope. You can be a part of the project, by becoming a Cosmic Pixel!"

Lately I've been putting some work in gozapread again.
I tried to make it easier to create bots.

- I added some documentation to everything that's public.
- I've just commited changes for the error handling. I try to always return the error that occured, or decorate it with an educated guess on what happened.
- There are tests, finally. That should make it easier to find & fix bugs in gozapread in the future.
. Some bugs were fixed (some found by the tests, whoop) & I refactored the code
- I've created a logo ;)

There's still alot to do. I really want to integrate the websockets soon, but I have had troubles with it.
Realtime bots would really be awesome, so I'll explore it again soon I guess.
I should also improve everything I already did. Tests, errors and documentation is still very minimal.
Whatever, next time I want to use gozapread it's way more fun, which brings me to the next thing: bot ideas.

I've been thinking about automatically sharing some specific youtube channels videos here... but that's still kinda lame.
Lately we have had lots of spam, I might explore a bot that could detect that.
They look weird enough that maybe some free scanners can detect them, then I could automatically downvote them and comment the certainty of it being spam.
Any other ideas?

Pretty serious science here.

I'm finding quite a lot of interesting browser extensions lately.

AdNauseam is clicking on all ads that you blocked. It's based on uBlock Origin.
That's a more active apprach to mock advertisers than just blocking ads, kinda like trakkin.me.
If the software is good enough, it might even cost the advertisers some money, because they pay per click.