The official results release date is usually about two weeks after the end of the exam period. In practice, subject marks become visible a week or two earlier than the official release date, and can be inferred even earlier by detecting a change in calculated WAM (Weighted Average Mark) as soon as the results are in the system (days before the results themselves are made visible on the results page).
This script periodically checks the my.unimelb results page to detect any changes to your WAM and listed results, and sends you a notification when a change is detected. If you run this script in the background on your computer or on a VPS, you'll be free to enjoy the first few weeks of your holidays without compulsively checking the results page yourself! Or is it just me who does that?
Made with 💜 by Matt, with contributions from CaviarChen, blueset, josephsurin, and alanung.
Clone this repository to get started WAM Spamming!
The basic WAM Spam script requires Python 3.6 (or higher).
Once you have Python installed, you'll also need the following two third-party Python packages for web scraping:
- Requests, and
- beautifulsoup4.
You can easily install these with pip
using the command pip3 install requests beautifulsoup4, or however else
you prefer to install Python packages.
While the script has sensible default settings, it's also easily configurable.
You can modify the constants atop wamspam.py to easily change the behaviour.
Some important configuration options are:
-
CHECK_REPEATEDLY: By default, the script will repeatedly check your WAM until you kill it. If you want the script to check your WAM only once, set this toFalse. -
DELAY_BETWEEN_CHECKS: You can configure how often the script logs in to check for results. I had mine set to check every 5 minutes (roughly the frequency at which I would be checking if it wasn't for this script). But that seemed excessive... so I set the default to 60 minutes. -
DEGREES_TO_WATCH: Unlike in a previous version, the script will watch all degrees listed on your results page by default (DEGREES_TO_WATCH = "all"). If you'd prefer it not to check them all for some reason, change this to a set of degree indices to check (e.g.DEGREES_TO_WATCH = {0}to watch only the first degree in the list). For students with only one degree, this option is ignored.
There are some other configuration options, all documented in the script itself.
The script can notify you using a range of notification methods. Each requires its own configuration, as explained below:
The default notifcation method. The script will log in to your university email account and send you a self-email notifying you about the WAM/results change.
This option requires no additional configuration, but if you see an error (or
similar):
smtplib.SMTPAuthenticationError: (535, b'5.7.8 Username and Password not accepted')
then Google must be blocking the script's attempt to log into your SMTP server.
This is because Google thinks the way the script logs into your account does not
meet their security standards. One work-around is to go to: your Google
security settings
and turn on the option to "allow less secure apps".
You might like to remember to turn it off when you get your results.
Also see the oauth-contrib branch for work to add an OAuth2.0-based email
notification method.
The script will use the ServerChan API to send you a WeChat message.
You'll need to acquire a WeChat account and a ServerChan API key.
Set up your account and then configure the script with your API key
(you can hard-code it into wamspam.py, or add code to read it from a file
or environment variable or standard input, for example).
Remember to keep your secrets safe!
The script will contact a Telegram Bot so that it may send you a Telegram message.
You will need a Telegram account and a Telegram bot (which can be created using @BotFather). You'll then need a bot access token, which will be in the format:
123456789:AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMm
Set up your Telegram account and note the numerical user, group, or channel ID
you wish to be contacted through (your 'destination').
Configure the script with your access token and destination (you can hard-code
them into wamspam.py, or add code to read them from a file or environment
variable or standard input, for example).
Remember to keep your secrets safe!
The script will use the Pushbullet API to send you a push notification (to whichever devices you have their apps installed).
You'll need to acquire a Pushbullet account and API Access Token for this.
Set up your account and link your desired devices, then configure the script
with your access token (you can hard-code it into wamspam.py, or add code to
read it from a file or environment variable or standard input, for example).
Remember to keep your secrets safe!
The script will trigger an IFTTT webhook, which you can set up to contact you in any means supported by the IFTTT service.
You'll need an IFTTT account and a webhook key. You can retrieve a key here , and should be in the format:
Aa0Bb1Cc2Dd3Ee4Ff5Gg6H
Configure the script with your webhook key (you can hard-code it into
wamspam.py, or add code to read it from a file or environment variable or
standard input, for example).
The script will send notification messages with the event wam-spam, with
value1 set to the subject of the notification and value2 set to the
body text. Set up an IFTTT applet to respond to this event, and enter the
webhook key into the script at runtime, or hard-code it into
notify/by_ifttt.py.
Remember to keep your secrets safe!
The script will trigger a desktop notification displaying the update.
Desktop notifications require an additional third-party Python module,
notify2. First, install this package (e.g.
pip install notify2).
Depending on your platform, you may need to install support for desktop notifications. For example, for Arch linux, you'll need libnotify and a notification server.
No script configuration is required.
The script will log the notification message to a local file.
The only configuration required is to configure the name of the desired file
into the script (you can hard-code it into wamspam.py, or add code to read
it from a file or environment variable or standard input, for example).
The script can combine multiple notification methods in its attempt to reach you regarding a detected WAM change.
All you'll need to configure each of your desired notification methods individually using the above instructions, and ensure they all get added to the multi-notifier during the configuration section of the script. That is, to use multiple notification methods, just uncomment and configure multiple notification methods!
Once you have installed the requirements and configured the script, simply run
it with python3 wamspam.py.
The script will ask you for your unimelb username and password. It uses these to log into the results page on your behalf every however-many minutes you configured, looking for updated results. It stores the previous results in a JSON-formatted text file between checks, for comparison.
The first time the script finds your results, or whenever it sees your results data change, the script will also send you a notification using your configured notification method(s).
Note: Don't forget to stop the script after the final results release date!
The script is not very robust. If anything goes wrong, it will probably crash with an overly dramatic error message. Please see these possible errors:
You might have typed your username or password wrong. Please check that you got them right, and try again.