Product goals and safety boundaries

Product purpose

RedditBot helps an operator discover suitable adult Reddit users who have explicitly posted in configured communities, start relevant conversations, prioritize existing replies, and learn which outreach approaches lead to genuine engagement. It is an operator-controlled system, not an unconstrained bulk messenger.

The product has five connected goals:

Find candidates from explicitly configured subreddits.
Reject unsuitable candidates before expensive AI work or any send.
Coordinate multiple accounts without contacting the same person repeatedly.
Continue conversations only within configured, bounded automation policies.
Make every material decision and outcome visible to the operator.

What good behavior looks like

Eligibility is completed before selecting a recipient: already-processed posts, recipient history, self-declared age/gender for chat posts, seller signals, content suitability, and AI safety all have explicit outcomes.
Existing replies take priority over new outreach. An account with actionable inbound messages is not available for a new candidate.
Candidate inventory follows near-term outbound capacity and the recent-post window; discovery pauses instead of accumulating an ever-older backlog when accounts cannot keep pace.
Discovery is global while authentication, rate limits, conversations, and content remain account-owned.
Recipient deduplication is case-insensitive, durable across restarts, and protected by a live reservation during sends.
Remote side effects are fail-closed: a send is recorded only after the chat service confirms it; interrupted reply claims reconcile against Matrix history before retrying.
Dry-run prepares and records decisions but never sends.
Operators can see funnel stages, account state, rate limits, failures, handoffs, and recent activity rather than inferring success from a process-health check.

Candidate policy

Configured subreddits have a source type:

image: image-led posts are downloaded and analyzed before an opener is generated.
chat: text-led posts require a parseable self-declared gender and adult age, then use the chat-opener prompt.

Seller filtering combines the candidate post with Reddit profile/about and recent activity evidence. The configured keyword/domain lists are policy inputs, not a substitute for the surrounding screening flow. A profile lookup failure is not itself proof that a person is a seller; network and rate-limit failures must remain distinguishable from a rejection.

The system must not manufacture personal facts. Generated messages must not claim shared location or proximity, invite an in-person meeting, invent identity/history, or ignore a conversation boundary. The final outbound safety check is intentionally separate from prompt wording.

Conversation policy modes

Each subreddit snapshots a policy into a conversation when automation first handles it:

Mode	Meaning
`manual`	Never auto-reply; surface a human handoff.
`legacy`	A short, bounded media-request flow retained for existing behavior.
`r4r`	Bounded rapport-style replies with autonomous safety checks.
`r4r-media`	Rapport first, one bounded media ask, then a handoff/terminal boundary.

The snapshot matters: changing configuration later must not silently rewrite the rules for an active conversation. Automation stops for seller/upsell evidence, an image received, a detected boundary, unsafe content, an exhausted turn budget, or a manual policy.

Success and analytics

Do not collapse all progress into “messages sent.” Useful states include:

candidates discovered, screened, ready, leased, retrying, rejected, expired, and sent;
sends awaiting a mature response window versus mature sends;
replies, declined/boundary/upsell outcomes, and images received;
model usage, fallback behavior, strategy/sample size, and account ownership.

Fetched listing size is not an eligibility count. Logs and UI should quantify rejection and deferral reasons so a dry funnel can be diagnosed without guessing.

Operational authority

The following require explicit user authorization because they can affect real accounts or production state:

starting or resuming bot processing;
sending a message or triggering a send-capable workflow;
importing/replacing account sessions;
restarting or deploying the production service;
changing live configuration;
deleting/resetting databases, volumes, media, or account state.

Read-only inspection, builds, tests, and documentation work do not grant any of those permissions. If a request is only diagnostic, inspect and explain before editing or operating.

Privacy and secrets

Treat these as sensitive: .env, Reddit cookies, exported session JSON, Matrix access tokens, dashboard/agent tokens, the SQLite database, browser profiles, conversation text, usernames, private media, and logs that may contain request metadata.

Never commit or reproduce them in documentation, fixtures, logs, issue text, or tool output. Prefer redacted structural evidence. Production backups contain account and private conversation data and need the same protection as the live volume.

5.2 KiB Raw Blame History