troll-me

Creating a smart AI to troll Facebook friends.

Getting Started

Make sure you have Node.js installed. This application only is supported on versions 0.10 and above.

Running Locally

$ git clone git@github.com:mcopley08/troll-me.git
$ cd troll-me
$ npm install
$ node index.js

Your app should now be running on localhost:5000.

The current master branch of the project is kept up-to-date at www.troll-me.com.

Quick Start

Here are a few quick things you can do to get familiar with the application:

• To edit the troll-me algorithm, edit public/vendor/troll_me_algorithm.js. To edit the UI of the website and/or the jQuery that executes on certain events, edit views/home.html.

• Simply find the word bank section of troll_me_algorithm.js and add your own comment/status templates for trolling! Be sure to follow the format of each array, and including single or double quotes is not supported currently and will cause an error with the Facebook API call (yes, even with escape characters - if you can fix it go for it).

• Modify the generateComment() function. The image url is passed to the function for the photo the comment belongs to, so calling an API with the link or integrating the image in some way would be awesome (see the Further Enhancements section for detailed suggestions).

Walkthrough of the troll-me Algorithm

Once the 'Start Trolling!' button is pressed,

1. The algorithm will start drawing user information in three 6 month intervals, starting from the interval 18 to 12 months ago, then 12 to 6 months ago, then 6 months to the present. It does this to make sure it trolls a wide time span across the user's timeline. The number of intervals is customizable. There is a variable called how_long_ago in troll_me_algorithm.js that represents the number of years to go back in the timeline. The default is 1.5, and it must only be whole or half numbers.

2. In every six month time interval, it grabs 25 photos from the user's profile in that time period, then deletes all of the photos that don't have any comments. Then, it will grab one random photo to make a photo comment, and another random photo to like a random comment. It will add these photo objects to their appropriate arrays. The number of photos to comment on/comments to like is customizable. The first parameter to the Math.min() in the following line:

   for (var i = 0; i < Math.min(1, response.data.length); i++) {
   

   is the number of photos it grabs for comments, as well as the number of random comments it grabs to like - the way it is set up, they both rely on this parameter. You can easily change this number to your desired amount.

3. After this, it will generate three status updates using information from the user's profile:

• Incorporating the user's birthday.
• Taking into account one of the user's music interests.
• Attributing a random quote to one of your friends (from the Taggable Friends API call).

and put them into the appropriate arrays.

4. It will then call the displayData() function and it will generate the html to provide the user with their options of suggested trolls. Once it is complete, it is displayed to the user.

5. The user can then select whether or not they want to execute any (or all) of the suggested 'trolls'. They also have the option to generate a new batch of 'trolls' if they press the Troll Again! button, however if this is pressed a number of times there is an issue with this (see the Known Issues section below).

Order of Execution

There is a specific order of calls that are made to achieve the desired output. It is described below:

1. testAPI() - calls photo_API_request(checkLength, final_check);
2. photo_API_request() - calls checkLength(final_check);
3. checkLength() - calls final_check();
4. final_check() - either calls photo_API_request(checkLength, final_check) again (repeating steps 2 through 4), or calls populatePosts();
5. populatePosts()
6. displayData()

One call to the testAPI() function will execute steps 1 through 5 in order, and then after it returns you need to call displayData().

This is why in home.html, when the submit-troll button is pressed, it only calls the following functions in this order:

testAPI();
displayData();

Known Issues

The following are issues that I've been aware of, but haven't fixed quite yet:

• When a user tries to login with Facebook on Google Chrome for iOS, this error usually shows up:

   to use facebook please select your settings app → safari → accept cookies → from visited
  

  Going into the settings for the iPhone and clearing the browser data and changing the cookie settings will fix it though. This article explains how to resolve the issue.

• If a user presses Troll Now! multiple times, the following error message will show up:

   Uncaught RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded
  

  From my understanding, it is due to loading multiple versions of the Facebook JavaScript SDK.

• If a generated comment/post contains any form of quotation marks (single or double) it will not post to Facebook and will return with an error.

• There has been an issue with the taggable_friends Facebook API call - even when users are approved for access, this still returns an error for them. The only effect is that it will generate two statuses instead of three for them, it doesn't break the application.

Suggestions for Further Enhancements

• Having a modal pop-up on the 'troll-me' website to see where the photo comment/photo like is going to be executed. This cannot be done in an iframe because Facebook doesn't allow this, however you can create a custom view with the meta-data you get from each photo object in the Facebook API calls.

• Make an API call to IBM's Watson or other Visual Recognition services, so that when comments are generated you can have a few words that describe a photo and integrate them into the "troll" comment.

• Integrate a user's events into messages (Facebook only allows a kind of restricted access, though).

• Mention/Tag friends in the comments/statuses instead of simply mentioning their name.

• Send messages to random friends.

• Improving the bank of comments/statuses that are generated.

• Calling an API or script to generate random sentences, possibly incorporate user's names.

• Getting rid of the bank of comment/status templates and use NLP algorithms to generate them dynamically.

• Post random photos/links to weird & funny things from the user.

• Like more things than simply photo comments, such as photos, statuses, activity, etc.

• Allow the user to choose how far back in the timeline the trolls should be generated for (effectively just letting them change the how_long_ago variable).

• Share random status updates from public users (political figures, department stores, artists, etc.)

Things to Note

• Taggable Friends which is used to mention random friends in statuses, requires additional approval to be used in the application.

• Animate.css is already included in the package, so if you wanted to improve on the UI it is available.

IMPORTANT NOTES

Do NOT change the application in such a way that the algorithm will post to the user's Facebook profile without asking them for permission beforehand.

Do NOT change this application to generate anything with profanity, or any material that is offensive or sexual.