Starting on Telescope and Finding a New Issue

With Hacktoberfest behind us, our next assignments are to make a large contribution to an open source project, and to develop features for Telescope, a site where blog posts across numerous websites are condensed into a single feed.

Working with Telescope

Telescope requires the Redis database and caching service, meaning I will have to set up Redis on my system before working on any issues. Currently I'm running into issues with this, but I should be able to resolve it by the end of the weekend.

Telescope Issue

For my contribution to Telescope, I will be creating a spam checker that detects and removes blog posts that could potentially be spam. While setting up Redis, I have been reading up on spam checking methodology in order to get an idea of what rules I should implement. So far I have decided to check for image-only posts, as well as for posts that use excessive capitalization. I should also come up with a dictionary of phrases that indicate that a post is potentially spam. However, as most examples involve machine learning, my solution will likely be not as flexible, but I will try to make it as effective as I possible can given my skills.

External Issue

I have not decided what issue I will work on for my external issue, but I think I might make another contribution to Pokemon Showdown if I can find a good issue, as I have already worked on the project before.

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