modmail-autoreply

For those times when you're out of the office for that 'unpaid volunteer' work you do for a for-profit company, this small script will auto-reply to new messages sent to your modmail inbox. You can customize it however you want trivially - it's only a handful of lines!

This is an "opinionated" autoreply and only autoreplies to generic modmail, not join requests (disable those at Reddit's platform level if you don't want them), not ban appeals or other mod messages (humans should still handle these), etc.

Quickstart

Assumes you already have Python installed and are comfortable with basics.

1. Clone this repository to your local system
2. Install dependencies, ex. pip3 install -r requirements.txt
3. Copy config.example.py to a new file, config.py
4. Obtain Reddit API credentials and place them in config.py. Not familiar with how to get API credentials? Use JC Chouinard's guide!
5. Edit the ooto_message on line 5 of autoreply.py with whatever text you want to autoreply to new messages with, and the ooto_subreddit on line 6 with what subreddit you want to monitor for messages
6. Run python3 autoreply.py and the bot will leave your out-of-office/we-are-blackout reply for as long as the script is running

Advanced Start

An example fly.toml defintion and Dockerfile are included for anyone interested in running this as a container or on Fly.io (where we run a number of our bots). Though it's late, so you'll have to work with those on your own.

Quirks

As mentioned, this bot will ignore ban appeals, moderator discussions, join requests, etc. to try to avoid disrupting other discussions. However if you have a long-lived conversation thread and someone makes a new reply, this bot won't care and will throw up the autoreply + archive.

This bot attempts to only reply to each conversation thread once, so if there is a question not answered by your out-of-office message then people can reply and still reach through to moderators.

The conversation thread deduplication is in-memory, so if you close and restart the script it will lose this memory. It also means the memory usage of the program could grow unbounded, however this is unlikely to be problematic in practice unless your modmail is being attacked.