I apologize in advance if this is not the right subreddit to ask this, and am open to suggestions for a more appropriate subreddit.

I've written a small bot (code here) which when given certain keywords in a comment, will reply with the requested rule.

This is about the limit of my (feeble) understanding of Python, but I know it can be done better!

Specifically, is there a way to stop the bot from repeatedly replying in case of restarts? (/u/bboe felt this would be the proper place to ask this question)

Is there a more efficient way than the IF...ELIF...ELSE loops?

Is there a way to check if the author is a moderator instead of hard coding their names? What about having it reply to moderators AND trusted non-moderators?