fixed a silly but rather bad bug\ni'm pretty sure i'm gonna stop working on fedibooks, and everything else i do relating to fedi. writing complex webapps to (rather poorly) interface with decentralised, half-standardised social networking platforms really isn't for me, and much of this code is honestly pretty awful. i have no idea why i did some of this stuff - for example, writing an object to interface with the outbox json would have been a LOT cleaner than what i'm currently doing. fedibooks really doesn't work well at all, and its biggest flaw is, of course, the fact that it can't interact with any instances using authenticated fetch. while i may fix minor bugs from time to time, i can pretty much guarantee that one's never getting fixed. i'm not shutting down fedibooks.com or anything like that - and if i ever do, i'll give advance warning - but don't expect any new features here, or in mstdn-ebooks, OCRbot, et al. but hey, at least it's fixed now.

app/functions.py

@@ -88,7 +88,7 @@ def generate_output(handle):
 	posts = "\n".join(list(sum(c.fetchall(), ())))
 	if len(posts) == 0:
 		print("{} - No posts to learn from.".format(handle))
-		return
+		return bot, None
 
 	if bot['fake_mentions'] == 'never':
 		# remove all mentions from the training data before the markov model sees it
@@ -99,8 +99,8 @@ def generate_output(handle):
 	post = None
 
 	# even with such a high tries value for markovify, it still sometimes returns none.
-	# so we implement our own tries function as well, and try ten times.
-	while post is None and tries < 10:
+	# so we implement our own tries function as well, and try five times.
+	while post is None and tries < 5:
 		post = model.make_short_sentence(bot['length'], tries = 1000)
 		tries += 1
 
@@ -138,6 +138,10 @@ def make_post(args):
 
 	bot, post = generate_output(handle)
 
+	# post will be None if there's no posts for the bot to learn from.
+	# in such a case, we should just exit without doing anything.
+	if post == None: return
+
 	client = Mastodon(
 		client_id = bot['client_id'],
 		client_secret = bot['client_secret'],
@@ -199,9 +203,9 @@ def get_key():
 
 		key['private'] = privkey.exportKey('PEM').decode('utf-8')
 		key['public'] = privkey.publickey().exportKey('PEM').decode('utf-8')
-		
+
 		dc.execute("INSERT INTO http_auth_key (private, public) VALUES (%s, %s)", (key['private'], key['public']))
-	
+
 	dc.close()
 	db.commit()
 
@@ -243,4 +247,4 @@ def signed_get(url, timeout = 10, additional_headers = {}, request_json = True):
 
 	r = requests.Request('GET', url, headers)
 	return r.headers
-	# return requests.get(url, timeout = timeout)
+	# return requests.get(url, timeout = timeout)