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Berkeley Lost & Found ⌕

A live web dashboard that automatically scrapes r/berkeley for lost item posts and removes any that have been resolved (i.e. a comment says the item was found/returned).

Preview

Live Demo

🔗 https://berk-lost-found.onrender.com/

First load may take ~30 seconds because it'a on the free tier If it takes too long to load you can also run it locally with instructions below.

Features

• Scrapes r/berkeley for lost item posts using Reddit's public JSON API
• Auto-filters resolved posts by scanning comments for "found" signals
• Search and filter by date
• Live scrolling ticker of active lost items
• One-click refresh button to re-scrape

Tech Stack

• Backend: Python + Flask
• Scraping: requests + Reddit public JSON API
• Frontend: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS
• Deployment: Render

Run Locally

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Scrape Reddit data
python scraper.py

# Start the Flask server
python app.py

Then open http://localhost:5000

Project Structure

berkeley-lost-found/
├── app.py              # Flask API + routes
├── scraper.py          # Reddit scraper with resolved-post filtering
├── berkeley_lost.json  # Scraped data (auto-generated)
├── requirements.txt    # Python dependencies
├── render.yaml         # Render deployment config
└── templates/
    └── index.html      # Frontend dashboard

How the "found" detection works

After fetching each lost post, the scraper fetches its comments and checks for keywords like: "found it", "returned", "resolved", "dm sent", "already found", etc.

If any comment matches, the post is excluded from the dashboard.

Built With

• html
• python
• reddit
• requests