Input from IT/Coding/Techie types required

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**Ketara**

So this is from my girlfriend:-

I'm doing my Masters degree, and my dissertation involves analysing fandom archives. A lot of the data is too old to reflect certain changes that took place in 2018 that I want to map. A person has made their scripts available on github (for anyone to use) and they are designed to perform scrapes on the sites I want to gather data from (Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own, etc.) I know little about Python and coding in general, so I don't know how much I need to know to be able to do this.

I suppose my question is: could I perform the data scrapes with the scripts provided, or is it beyond my skillset and a waste of time trying?

P.s. scripts https://github.com/fandomstats/toastystats

So I know absolutely jack about anything to do with this. Nada. Nothing. Barely understand what she's talking about. I don't know if what she's asking makes technical sense, whether it's even feasible, and if it is, whether it consists of hitting a button or five days hard work. Any advice about these things would be appreciated.

**Ketara**

john_chandler wrote:
Yup, as above. Looks like each of the scrapers have a decent Readme file on usage, and there are no external dependencies (which should make things easier).

Just to add, as someone who sometimes has to write scrapers, they can be incredibly fragile. Assuming there have been no changes to the sites, things should be okay. However, if any of the sites have changed since July 2019 (looking at the repo) the respective scraper might have a problem.

So is it possible that the code might need rewriting slightly? If so, who would you hire to do that and how complex would it be?

Again, I've absolutely no idea about any of this, so do excuse if what I'm asking is idiotic.

**Ketara**

So the general consensus here is that it will be difficult for someone with no knowledge to execute well, due to potentially messy and obsolete code.

What sort of timeframe would it take an average professional to fix it up and have it feed out the data? If it's possible to guess, that is (I accept it may not be). Are we talking half an hour, an afternoon, or a week?