# Guerrilla Marketing > Operator playbook for `studio guerrilla` — a bot that posts a capped number of on-topic, transcript-grounded comments per day under other creators' recent videos from the configured channel, to attract viewers indirectly. Use when the user wants to RUN the guerrilla comment loop (`tick`), DEPLOY the commenter to a VPS, GENERATE a preview batch to read before posting live, SHOW posted comment links, TUNE the age window / daily cap, CHECK the circuit breaker, MANAGE the watchlist, or DEBUG why nothing posted on a tick. Covers the full pipeline (discover → rank → transcript → topic → highlight → compose → critic → rails → post → track), the ban-defense gates, and the remote-deploy Makefile. - Skill: `dasein108/guerrilla-marketing-2` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add dasein108/guerrilla-marketing-2` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/dasein108/guerrilla-marketing-2/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Marketing & Growth - Author: dasein108 (https://skillmd.com/u/dasein108) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/dasein108/guerrilla-marketing-2 --- # guerrilla-marketing — indirect reach via grounded comments `studio guerrilla` finds recent uploads on a watchlist of other creators' YouTube channels, writes one comment that reacts to something specific the video actually says, scores it with a critic, runs it through a set of rate-discipline rails, and — only if everything passes — posts it from the configured channel. It then tracks whether the comment survives and, over weeks, whether any of this moves subscribers. **The mechanism is indirect.** Nobody clicks a link — there isn't one; the deny-list makes posting one a code-level impossibility. The bet is that an interesting, on-topic comment makes a reader click the commenter's *name*, which lands them on the configured channel's own page. That's the whole conversion path: one good comment, one profile click, maybe one subscribe. **This is gray-hat and ToS-adjacent.** Automated commenting is spam under YouTube's Terms of Service under any honest reading of the policy — nothing here asks permission or hides behind a gray area. It just tries to stay far enough inside YouTube's actual enforcement behavior (comment removal, shadow-holds, account flags) to not get the channel banned. Every comment posts through the operator's own OAuth client, so every comment is attributable to the real channel — there is no throwaway identity absorbing the risk. Ban-defense is therefore the core design, not an afterthought: a hard daily cap, per-channel cooldowns, a denylist that makes self-promotion impossible in code (not just an LLM instruction), a near-duplicate filter, style/opening diversity checks, and a circuit breaker that watches comment survival and pages the operator when it drops. None of that makes this compliant — it makes it a calculated, monitored bet. ## The pipeline ``` watchlist channels │ ▼ DISCOVER ── new uploads per watched channel (YouTube Data API, cheap quota) │ ▼ RANK ── hard gates: age, comment count, channel size, cooldown, daily cap, │ active window (cheapest gate first — nothing paid runs yet) ▼ TRANSCRIPT ── cached fetch (network, not LLM); no captions → skip at zero LLM cost │ ▼ TOPIC ── classify against a transcript excerpt; unclear topic → skip │ ▼ HIGHLIGHT ── find one real, specific moment in the video to react to │ ▼ COMPOSE ── several comment variants, each a different style + wording │ ▼ CRITIC ── grounded judge scores each variant against the transcript excerpt │ ▼ RAILS ── denylist, near-duplicate, opening-repeat, style-overuse, │ timestamp-verify, spacing, active-window, blackout ▼ POST ── the OAuth client posts the #1 surviving variant │ ▼ TRACK ── re-check likes/replies/survival; the circuit breaker lives here ``` Order is a cost contract as much as control flow: the cheapest gate always runs first, so a video that will never qualify (too old, too many comments already, channel too small, on cooldown) is rejected before anything LLM-priced runs, and a video whose topic is unclear is rejected before the more expensive highlight/compose/ critic chain. A comment that collides with recent posting history (near-duplicate, same opening, style overused) falls through to the *next-best* composed variant instead of abandoning the video outright — compose already paid for several for exactly this reason. ## CLI surface ```bash studio guerrilla --help # always the live source of truth ``` | Command | What it does | |---|---| | `guerrilla watchlist add --channel --title "..." --median-views N --tags "..."` | Add a target channel to comment on. No auto-discovery yet — `--median-views` is supplied by hand; lowballing it makes the channel-size gate reject that channel's videos for no reason. | | `guerrilla watchlist list [--all]` | List active watchlist channels (`--all` includes paused/banned/rejected). | | `guerrilla watchlist resume --channel ` | Un-pause a channel a transient discovery error paused. | | `guerrilla tick --channel [--cap N] [--dry-run] [--max-age-min N] [--cite-timestamps]` | One full discover→post cycle. `--cap` is 10-25 (default 12). | | `guerrilla track --channel ` | Refresh likes/replies/survival on posted comments; evaluates the circuit breaker. | | `guerrilla resume --channel ` | Manually clear a tripped circuit breaker — only after investigating. | | `guerrilla report --channel [--write]` | Effectiveness by style tag, skip-reason counts, switchback readout. | | `guerrilla rollup --channel --channel-id --start --end --experiment-start ` | Pull daily subs/views into `channel_daily` so `report`'s switchback section can resolve. | | `guerrilla queue --channel ` | List comments the critic scored into the "queue" band (3.0-4.0), awaiting approval. | | `guerrilla approve --channel [--cap N]` | Post one queued comment's exact proposed text through the same rails as a live tick. | **`--dry-run` is the pre-flight review.** It runs discovery through the content rails (denylist, near-duplicate, opening-repeat, style-overuse, timestamp-verify) and prints every comment that *would* post, then stops — no YouTube write, no rate-limit/cooldown state touched. It costs the same LLM calls a real tick would. Read every line it prints before ever dropping the flag. This gate is not optional and nothing skips it. ## The gates and rails **Rank gates** (`rank.py`, cheapest first — reject before anything paid runs): | Gate | Default | Why | |---|---|---| | age | < 90 min since publish | early enough to still hold a visible slot | | comment count | < 40 existing comments | past this a new comment is buried | | channel size | median views ≥ 5000 | below this there's no audience to reach | | channel cooldown | 72h since last comment on that channel | spreads posts across the watchlist | | active window | 09:00-23:00 UTC | a 4am comment reads as a bot | | daily cap | 10-25/day, operator-set | the hard ceiling on total risk exposure | **Content rails** (`rails.py`, checked immediately before every post): | Rail | What it catches | |---|---| | deny-list | links, the channel's own name/aliases, self-promo phrasing ("subscribe", "check out my..."), hashtags, emoji spam — enforced in code, not just prompted against, so an LLM ignoring instructions once in a thousand tries still can't post it | | near-duplicate | word-shingle (long comments) or character-gram (short comments) jaccard overlap against recently posted text — two different thresholds because the two representations behave differently at the same cutoff | | opening-repeat | same first-4-words scaffold as a recent comment — catches template-driven phrasing that near-duplicate alone misses | | style-overuse | the same style tag (`provocative_question` / `joke` / `contrarian_take` / `insight`) appearing ≥2 times in the last 5 posts | | timestamp-verify | any cited `M:SS`/`H:MM:SS` must fall inside the video's real duration and land near an actual transcript segment — an unverifiable citation is treated as unsafe | | spacing | at most one post per tick, jittered interval (~12min base ± jitter), never a fixed cadence | | publish blackout | suppressed for a window around the operator's own uploads, so comment-driven and upload-driven traffic stay separable | **The critic** scores every composed variant 0-5 against on-topic / provocative-or- funny / not-generic criteria, grounded against the real transcript excerpt (a claim the excerpt doesn't support scores 0, no partial credit). ≥4.0 auto-posts, 3.0-4.0 queues for `guerrilla approve`, below that is discarded. **The circuit breaker** (`track.py`): every `track` run computes survival — the fraction of the trailing 50 posted comments still live. Below 85%, the loop auto-pauses (`tick` returns `PAUSED`, exits non-zero) and sends a notification. Comments quietly disappearing or getting held for review is what a shadowban looks like from the outside — there is no other signal for it. **The correct response is to stop and investigate, never to lower the threshold.** Read `report`'s survival- by-style breakdown to see whether it's concentrated on one channel, one style, or one time window before deciding it's safe to `guerrilla resume`. ## Autonomous operation `tick` is meant to run unattended on a cron-like schedule, roughly every 20-40 minutes across the active window — more often doesn't buy anything, since the spacing rail already jitters pacing and discovery quota is cheap regardless of poll frequency; the daily cap is the real limiter, not tick frequency. `track` should run at least twice a day so a comment removed hours or days later still gets caught. `rollup` needs to run daily once a switchback experiment is running, or `report`'s effectiveness section stays `insufficient_data` indefinitely. **`--cite-timestamps` defaults OFF, and the reason is worth keeping in mind before turning it on:** the highlight stage's found-moment timestamps are unreliable — in practice they cluster near the start of a video regardless of where the quoted content actually is — and the "at 0:0X, when he says…" citation phrasing itself became a recognizably bot-shaped template. The composed comment still reacts to the found moment either way; turning citations on only changes whether it *names* a time. Leave it off unless a specific need for cited timestamps has been verified against real output. **Ramp the daily cap slowly.** Start at the floor (10) and only raise it after multiple clean weeks of `track` survival staying comfortably above the breaker threshold — never raise it in response to the breaker firing, and never raise it faster than the evidence supports. ## Remote deploy Some networks can't reach YouTube's Data API, transcript endpoints, and LLM providers reliably from wherever the operator drives from. `scripts/remote/guerrilla.mk` deploys the guerrilla pipeline to **a VPS with clean, unrestricted internet access to YouTube** and drives it from there, without touching anything else on the box. Host, SSH key, and any per-operator overrides live in the gitignored `scripts/remote/guerrilla.local.mk` — copy `scripts/remote/guerrilla.local.mk.example` to it and fill in `REMOTE_HOST` / `SSH_KEY`. The tracked `guerrilla.mk` never hardcodes a host or key path; it fails fast with a clear error if the local file is missing. **Local is the source of truth.** Every operation is `push (code + secrets + db → server) → exec → pull (db + logs → local)`, so the canonical SQLite db lives on your machine and a wiped server self-heals on the next run. Never run a cron *on the server* that mutates the db — it would fight the push. Schedule the Makefile targets *locally* instead. ```bash make -f scripts/remote/guerrilla.mk tick # push → one live cycle → pull the db back make -f scripts/remote/guerrilla.mk track # push → refresh metrics + breaker → pull make -f scripts/remote/guerrilla.mk preview # push → review batch (posts nothing) → pull batch.json make -f scripts/remote/guerrilla.mk posted # list every comment actually posted, as YouTube links make -f scripts/remote/guerrilla.mk deploy # full push + uv sync (no exec) make -f scripts/remote/guerrilla.mk shell # interactive ssh into the deploy dir ``` | Target | What it does (all push-then-pull) | |---|---| | `tick` | one discover→…→post cycle on the server, db synced back | | `track` | refresh comment metrics + run the circuit breaker | | `report` | effectiveness by style tag + the switchback verdict | | `resume` | clear a tripped circuit breaker | | `preview` | run `scripts/guerrilla_preview.py` (never imports `post`, so no live-post path); pull `batch.json` | | `posted` | every posted comment as a direct `youtube.com/watch?v=...&lc=...` link | | `deploy` | full `_push` (code + secrets + db + `uv sync`), no exec — first run or forced redeploy | | `shell` | interactive SSH into the remote deploy directory | Overridable vars: `CHANNEL`, `CAP` (daily cap), `MAX_AGE_MIN` (age window), `TARGET` / `PER_CHANNEL` (preview sizing). **Transcripts on a fresh network may need a proxy.** Some IPs — including some datacenter/VPS ranges — are rate-limited or blocked by YouTube for caption scraping. Set `TRANSCRIPT_PROXY_URL` (e.g. `http://user:pass@host:port`) in `.env` to route transcript fetches through an HTTP proxy; leave it unset for a direct connection. `transcript.py` retries a few times when a proxy is configured, since a proxied fetch occasionally hands out a rate-limited exit and a retry lands a working one. ## Hard operator rules - **This posts from the real channel.** There is no disposable identity absorbing the risk — treat every comment the bot posts as if it carries the operator's name, because it does. - **Ramp the daily cap slowly.** Start low, raise only after clean weeks, never in response to a breaker trip. - **Always run `--dry-run` and read every comment before the first live post**, and again after any change to the composer, the critic, or the rails. This is a human gate, not a formality — if a comment reads as filler, as bait, or as something you'd wince at being asked about, the pipeline needs work before it posts, not after. - **Never bypass the circuit breaker.** Lowering the survival threshold or hand- posting through a tripped breaker doesn't fix whatever tripped it — it just removes the only sensor that would have told the operator the channel was at risk. `guerrilla approve` itself refuses to post while the breaker is tripped. - **Expect a `null` switchback verdict, and don't read that as failure.** YouTube's API exposes no per-comment attribution — there's no way to trace a subscriber back to a specific comment — so the switchback experiment (days on / days off, comparing subscriber gain) is the only design that can answer "does this move the needle at all" without that attribution, and it needs `MIN_DAYS_PER_ARM` in *each* arm before `report` returns anything but `insufficient_data`. A `null` result is the system doing its job cheaply; don't re-run hoping for a different answer, and don't read a `positive` verdict with a wide confidence interval as more certain than its `ci_low`/`ci_high` actually says. ## Full reference [`docs/50-marketing/guerrilla/`](../../../docs/50-marketing/guerrilla/) — deeper architecture notes. The module-level source (`studio/guerrilla/*.py`) is extensively self-documented; when this skill and the code disagree, the code wins.