So I get the impression people want new bot features, but I want to know what they are! So far I've seen a few mentioned:
delaytell command (I'm guessing this means set a tell after a specific amount of time?)
command aliases (useful for canned responses in conjuction with a -say or -reply)
serving up of chatlines in some more useful format than (ill-formed) html, e.g. JSON
whattodo - a command which solves all of willfir's life management issues
a mute/gag command to mute users (even if this could be made to work, not sure how useful this would be with the stunnel setup currently in use, which would mean we can't do bans based on ip address, unless the bot receives the ip for users in their broadcast search messages or something similar, which it might)
some sort of commands for querying information about tv shows
show dogtanian output in twofo live
get the bot to listen to commands from twofo live
The first suggestion seems like it could be generalised to a 'scheduled action' thing.
What other things do people actually want to be able do with the bot?
I'm not putting myself forward to implement them btw, though it might be fun to give one or two a go, just slightly curious
Also a slightly rebodged MovieBOT would be handy. Should just be redoing the parsing of imbd pages to cope with the new layout divs, but I have nowhere to test it on to try myself. Perhaps a challenge for mids and his new perl skills?
I definitely agree that these sorts of things are good projects to hone your skills on (some can even be done without being in a bot environment, e.g. scraping IMDB pages). I don't have a place I can host a test instance of ODCH for people these days, but I might soon if I get my act together. I gather astro has had some fun trying to set it up in the past, but it definitely seemed easier in the newer ubuntu, as they added init scripts so you literally just have to apt-get install opendchub and it's already up and running, so perhaps astro-powered hosting is an option ;D
As another feature idea, how about logging of individual users' (reported) share over time? There's already some rudimentary share tracking that takes place.
Could go on to make a stats page/graph if you were so inclined, which might be useful.
Ooh, a graph of user numbers perhaps over time?
Also in the end perhaps persistent stats so we don't lose high user counts each time the dog is reset
(I am treating this basically as a wish list in full understanding that most of what I say will never come to pass, so don't mind me rambling in the background)
I need to wipe this here laptop, so I'll get me a working Win7 and Ubuntu again and dual boot and get cracking.
Once I've done that, I'll come and pester for existing source or info on how the hell to actually make a bot.
On a side note, slightly related to the persistant stats thing, some sort of -reloadrss command? Currently if the rss feed bodges up (through no fault of my own mark you, this time it was yoinkster uploading a folder with a random character encoding for the hyphen) the rss feed gets corrupted. When this happens the dog fails to read it and the script dies and can only be regained by resetting the dog as a whole thus losing stats and everything else.
I recompile odch all the time when a new release comes out so that's not a problem per se. We need someone to fix Dogtanian to output live bot chat though (and I simply don't have the time considering I'm not a perl supercoder).
And I have no clue how to either debug it (literally where it outputs to) or how to add it into a hub otherwise I'd have some sort of go on my test hub...
