Back in 2012 this all began as a very simple PHP Bot that would monitor known Gearbox Twitter and Facebook accounts for SHiFT Codes to be used in Borderlands 2. When the codes were found it would send off an email to my gaming group (Disdain Gaming) so that no one would ever go without. Very quickly it became evident that there was a need for this service in the community and the bot was rewritten to allow for anyone to signup and receive these notifications. We hosted this at our now defunct website Disdain Gaming.
After a quick post on Reddit the interest far exceeded what I was capable of handling and eventually it became cost prohibitive to allow any more signups. At this point I once again went back to the drawing board and this time came up with the Twitter Account dgSHiFTCodes . This would allow the bot to continue to monitor known accounts but now instead of having to send out thousands of emails, it could simply retweet the codes and followers would be instantly notified in their timelines.
The website continued to function but had signups disabled and more/less acted as a mirror of the Twitter timeline. The one exception being that in 2016 the domain changed over to Orcicorn.com as Disdain Gaming was shutdown. The bot continued to function nearly autonomously catching the weekly codes and retweeting them.
Introducing VIP Codes
In early 2019 the Borderlands VIP System was launched. This was part of the Borderlands 3 marketing push that led up to the launch of the game. Periodically different codes were sent out that would grant points that could later be used to as currency for weapons, skins and heads in various games. The bot struggled with these codes as there wasn’t any set pattern or delivery method associated to them. To compound the issue, community interest in these codes and subsequently my Twitter account sky rocketed.
To accommodate these changes, I ( Orcicorn ) began to take a more hands-on approach to the Twitter account. This allowed me personally curate all the VIP Codes while allowing the Bot to focus on what it does best, SHiFT Codes. Since April 2019 I’ve been actively participating in the twitter account and currating all the different codes I can find on the internet. I offer what support I can for some of the most frequently asked questions, provide links to more indepth sources for problems I can not answer and setup the occassional community giveaway of one-time-use codes and DLC for the franchise. All of this donated by the community to the community.
Site Revamp
Now in late 2019 the site and bot have been revamped yet once more to solve on of the most common requests I see on the Twitter timeline…. archived codes.
What used to be a simple Twitter interface is now a Hugo powered archive of known SHiFT and VIP Codes that is both manually and automatically updated as new information is discovered. The system is far from perfect but it is functional and provides a “one-stop-shop” for all your SHiFT & VIP Code needs.
Real-time communications are handled directly through TweetDeck on the dgSHiFTCodes account while the Bot handles the majority of the Hugo updates through a variety of BASH, Python and PHP Scripts.
If you have any comments, questions or concerns you can contact me directly through Twitter or just drop an Email
SHiFTBot
Occassionaly referred to on this page and on the Twitter account, SHiFT Bot is a series of scripts that powers the detection and publishing of new SHiFT and VIP codes. I’ve written extensively about how this custom set of scripts works on the about SHiFTBot page. It is pretty dry but may be of interest to other like minded individuals.
Disclaimer
For the sake of clarity and transparency this is a FAN SITE. I am not affiliated with Gearbox Software, 2KGames, Borderlands or anything or anyone else in anyway what so ever. If you need support, want to complain or are looking for anything official, you need to reach out to those people. It’s their game, their software, their branding, their trademarks, their copyrights. I’m just a fan of the series who’s curating content. That’s it, that’s all.