Hello everyone,

We get a lot of mod mail about people's posts not showing up and I wanted to explain why.

We are very fortunate in a subreddit of our size to have limited reasons to moderate, as we are all united by our love of reading and you all do a good job of positively contributing to this community. Thank you for that!

On the other hand, you might be surprised at how much spam we get from authors and bloggers, and by keeping our spam filters high it helps us to catch a lot of what gets posted. You all do a great job of reporting the rest, and we appreciate you.

Due to the spam filters and automod settings we have in place, some of your posts get temporarily filtered until we can review them. Reddit recently created an automated message site-wide that creates a lot of confusion, saying your post has been removed. PLEASE do not post again. We aren't able to edit this message and we can't turn it off. Your post hasn't been removed, it is just awaiting moderation. If your post is removed by us, we will always give you a reason why and reference which rule has been violated. If there isn't a reason, it was either removed by Reddit (you might be shadow banned and don't realize it) or it is in the moderation queue and will be actioned. Either way, multiple posts won't help.

Thanks for understanding as we keep up with Reddit's changes. We love this community and all of your passionate posts about books. Keep reading and sharing, everyone!

Hello all,

(Message to the mods: this is a Meta post, please contact me if something is wrong!)

The goodreads-bot Legacy

As you must know if you were already here last year, our beloved bot stopped working in January after having been used 156.631 times on this subreddit by a total of 25.272 different users, because goodreads shut down API access.

As a bored nerd and fellow reader, I decided to start a new toy project: rise our bot back! But because the Goodreads API is now closed, the first task was to build my own Books database... which I did, using Reddit, Goodreads & Google Books.

This new bot called ("bot" + "reboot" = "rebot".....) is open source (link to source code below). I wanted to thank , the author of , for the original idea. I am not , but I have great respect for his/her work and its legacy. Thank you!

How does it work? Just like before! (with more features)

Write {{Harry Potter}} in your post or alternatively {{A Little Life by Hanya Yaniagara}} (notice the typo) with a "by" and the bot will answer with more information about the book or the series.

The search part is now part of the bot (and not on Goodreads API side), and was quite challenging to handle. You definitely should specify the author with the "by" keyword, because it helps the Database search.

Examples:

You should read {{Harry Potter}} ! will work, it will recognize it as the name of a Series, in that case it will provide information about the first book of the Series;

My favorite book is {{Call Me By Your Name}} will work too, the bot will try to find a book called Call Me by author named Your Name (because of the "by" keyword...) but it will fail to find one, so as a 2nd try because it's not that dumb, it will indeed find a book called Call Me By Your Name :)

Did you read {{1984 by Michael Radford}}? (notice the wrong author): it will work too even if the author is wrong, because when the search fails using the author, it will try again ignoring it.

Features

I added a "Top 2 recommended-along" section, featuring the 2 books that were the most recommended here on Reddit in the same threads than the book described. It is based on another toy project of mine (😅), a book recommending algorithm I am working on, which is based on the co-occurences of book titles in Reddit threads. Let me know if you find this new information useful.

Limitations

As explained before, the bot is based on a book database I build and update as much as I can. The search will sometimes fail to match some existing books, in particular very niche books, or the recent ones. I am working on having the best and up-to-date database as possible, meanwhile sorry for the misses!

Also, the bot is currently not running on other subreddits (like ), but because the code is really modular, it's just about configurations. FYI this is in the roadmap for the next few days/weeks.

Finally, I may reach some rate posting limits because of low karma. Hopefully, this will be solved soon after some time thanks to your help :)

You will find below more information (links being forbidden in posts).

I think that's it.

See you there!