A 50 line script illustrating the ease of botnets to exploit spam on sites like substack.

asshat.py

# Best run with "scrapy runspider asshats.py --nolog" in your terminal
import time
import scrapy
from selenium import webdriver 

# Variables needed - or, throw this garbage in a loop to produce ultimate ass-hattery
url = "https://somesubstackurl.substack.com/"
email = "someemail@gmail.com"

class MyAsshatSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = "asshat"
    start_urls = [url]

    def __init__(self):
        self.driver = webdriver.Firefox()

    def parse(self, response):
        self.driver.get(response.url)
        time.sleep(1)

        # type email into input box
        self.driver.find_element("xpath", '//div[@class="sideBySideWrap"]/input[@type="email"]').send_keys(email)

        time.sleep(2)

        # Click submit button
        self.driver.find_element("xpath", '//button[@type="submit"]').click()

        # Wait for next page
        time.sleep(2)

        # Click no pledge option
        self.driver.find_element("xpath", '//div[text()="No pledge"]/preceding-sibling::input').click()

        time.sleep(2)

        # Click subscribe button
        self.driver.find_element("xpath", '//button[@type="button"]').click()

        # Wait for next page
        time.sleep(2)

        # Click maybe later button
        self.driver.find_element("xpath", '//button[@type="button"]').click()

        # Wait at bit for aesthetic purposes
        time.sleep(2)

        # Close the browser
        self.drive.close()
        print("Done! Subscription to site " + url + " with email " + email + " has been added.")