anon

anon will watch Wikipedia for anonymous edits from a set of named IP ranges and will tweet when it notices one. It was inspired by @parliamentedits and was used to make @congressedits available until the account was suspended by Twitter in 2018. An archive of the @congressedits tweets up until that point is available. For more about why the @congressedits accounts was suspended see this article from The Wikipedian. anon is now being used by a community of users to post selected Wikipedia edits to Twitter.

anon can also send updates on GNU Social / Mastodon (see below)

Run

To run anon you will need to:

install Node (v6 or higher)
git clone https://github.com/edsu/anon.git
cd anon
npm install
cp config.json.template config.json
add twitter credentials for your bot to config.json (make sure the Twitter app you create has read/write permission so it can tweet)
add IP ranges/names to config.json
modify status template if desired
`./anon.js

IP Ranges

You will notice in the example config.json.template that you can configure ip address ranges using a netmask:

"143.231.0.0/16"

or with an array of start/end IP addresses:

["143.231.0.0", "143.231.255.255"]

These two are equivalent, but the former is a bit faster, and easier to read. The latter is convenient if your range is difficult to express using a netmask.

If you would like your configuration file to reference the IP addresses in the external file just use the filename. So instead of:

{
  "nick": "anon1234",
  "accounts": [
    {
      "consumer_key": "",
      "consumer_secret": "",
      "access_token": "",
      "access_token_secret": "",
      "template": "{{page}} Wikipedia article edited anonymously from {{name}} {{&url}}",
      "ranges": {
        "Home Network": [
          ["192.168.1.1", "192.168.255.255"]
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

you would have:

{
  "nick": "anon1234",
  "accounts": [
    {
      "consumer_key": "",
      "consumer_secret": "",
      "access_token": "",
      "access_token_secret": "",
      "template": "{{page}} Wikipedia article edited anonymously from {{name}} {{&url}}",
      "ranges": "ranges.json"
    }
  ]
}

Mastodon

If you want to send messages on Mastodon you'll need to create an application and then get an access token for the account you want to send on. A utility is included to help you do that:

npm run mastodon

Debugging

If you would like to test without tweeting you can run anon with the --noop flag, which will cause the tweet to be written to the console but not actually sent to Twitter.

./anon.js --noop

If you would like to see all the change activity (URLs for each change) to test that it is actually listening, use the --verbose flag:

./anon.js --verbose

Alternate Configuration Files

By default anon will look for a config.json file in your current working directory. If you would like to specify the location of the configuration file, use the --config parameter:

./anon.js --config test.config

With Docker

Build image

git clone the repo
cd anon
docker build . -t anon

Run image

create your config.json file
docker run -v $PWD/config.json:/opt/anon/config.json anon

Develop

There is not much to anon but there is a small test suite, which might come in handy if you want to add functionality.

npm test

Which Wikipedias?

anon uses the wikichanges module to listen to 38 language Wikipedias. wikichanges achieves this by logging in to the Wikimedia IRC server and listening to the recent changes channels for each Wikipedia. So if you plan on running wikichanges be sure your network supports IRC (it can sometimes be blocked).

Here are the Wikipedias that it currently supports:

Additionally, the following miscellaneous Wikimedia sites:

If you would like to have another one added please add a ticket to the wikichanges issue tracker.

Community

Below is a list of known anon instances. Please feel free to add, in an alphabetic order, your own by sending a pull request.

License:

CC0 public domain dedication

edsu/anon

edsu

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