Minor IRC Bot update, feedback welcome

[Jonas Obrist]

Hi everyone,

Guess this is as good a place to post this as any. For those that don't know, I maintain and run our little helper IRC bot on #django-cms, CMSBottu. 

I just pushed an update that will make the bot inform users with usernames that start with "guest" (case-insensitive) that they can change their username using /nick. The idea behind this is to make it easier for us to identify users of (primarily) web-based IRC clients that often use "Guest" usernames. Let me know if you think this too "aggressive" or if it goes out of hand.

Also feel free to use this thread to give me feedback about the bot in general (things that should be removed/added/changed).

For those unaware, the bot currently has the following features:

* Any message including "#<number>" or "issue <number>" will try to link to the issue/pull request on Github with that number

* It watches the channel #django and cross-posts all messages including the string "CMS" to #django-cms (with a cooldown of 30 seconds to reduce spam)

* It watches the "django-cms" tag on stackoverflow and notifies #django-cms of new questions

* It allows users with +v or +o to use "!tell <username> <message>" to send offline messages to users. The user-level limitation is to prevent abuse, but maybe this isn't necessary or can be implemented better. 

Jonas

[John-Scott]

In my IRC client (Textual 5), there is a header at the top of the channel with some quick links to the docs, blog and github (not sure what the technical term for this is in IRC-land). This used to also contain a link to the online archives but have not seen it in a couple months. Not a major thing but was nice to have.

Most of what you mention seems to be features that work auto-magically. But are there any conventions/customizations for the channel that users should consciously use beyond the standard IRC commands (I've seen the #123 'syntax' recommended to users over full links before)? If so, perhaps this could be added to the contribution documentation and linked to at the top of the channel as well?

Thanks,

John-Scott

[Jonas Obrist]

On Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 2:23:24 AM UTC+2, John-Scott wrote:

In my IRC client (Textual 5), there is a header at the top of the channel with some quick links to the docs, blog and github (not sure what the technical term for this is in IRC-land). This used to also contain a link to the online archives but have not seen it in a couple months. Not a major thing but was nice to have.

The channel is still logged at https://botbot.me/freenode/django-cms/ (this is run by the great folks over at Lincoln Loop, completely independent of us, though I did request our channel to be logged by them).

 

Most of what you mention seems to be features that work auto-magically. But are there any conventions/customizations for the channel that users should consciously use beyond the standard IRC commands (I've seen the #123 'syntax' recommended to users over full links before)? If so, perhaps this could be added to the contribution documentation and linked to at the top of the channel as well?

There's a limit to how much you can reasonably put in an IRC topic (the thing at the top). There's also a hard-limit of how much you can put there (if I recall the RFC correctly it's 512 characters, though servers tend to not stick to the RFC too closely). So we have to trade-off what to put there. 

For the record, the reason I prefer the "#123" syntax over links to issues/pull requests is that the bot will pull out the title of the ticket, so in case I don't remember which ticket number was which ticket the title might be all I need to know.

Having said all that, maybe a very quick guide to how to use IRC/our channel in the docs under http://docs.django-cms.org/en/develop/contributing/index.html might be useful. It could mostly link to existing guides (how to use IRC) but could include specific things such as the #123 trick and maybe a reminder on how to ask "smart" questions on the internet (for example: don't ask to ask a question, just ask your question and then have some patience for someone to notice).

Jonas

[John-Scott]

On Friday, August 7, 2015 at 5:54:23 PM UTC-7, Jonas Obrist wrote:

On Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 2:23:24 AM UTC+2, John-Scott wrote:

In my IRC client (Textual 5), there is a header at the top of the channel with some quick links to the docs, blog and github (not sure what the technical term for this is in IRC-land). This used to also contain a link to the online archives but have not seen it in a couple months. Not a major thing but was nice to have.

The channel is still logged at https://botbot.me/freenode/django-cms/ (this is run by the great folks over at Lincoln Loop, completely independent of us, though I did request our channel to be logged by them).

Yep, that's the one. Sometimes when I hop on IRC it's the middle of a conversation so it's nice sometimes to jump over to the log to catch up on the history.

 

 

Most of what you mention seems to be features that work auto-magically. But are there any conventions/customizations for the channel that users should consciously use beyond the standard IRC commands (I've seen the #123 'syntax' recommended to users over full links before)? If so, perhaps this could be added to the contribution documentation and linked to at the top of the channel as well?

There's a limit to how much you can reasonably put in an IRC topic (the thing at the top). There's also a hard-limit of how much you can put there (if I recall the RFC correctly it's 512 characters, though servers tend to not stick to the RFC too closely). So we have to trade-off what to put there. 

Python says the current string is about 188 characters but if length is an issue, perhaps bit.ly urls? I'm not adamant that the link be added back, I just got used to it and found it handy for the reason mentioned above but I may be alone in that.

 

For the record, the reason I prefer the "#123" syntax over links to issues/pull requests is that the bot will pull out the title of the ticket, so in case I don't remember which ticket number was which ticket the title might be all I need to know.

I think it's a nice feature and one worth having, totally on board. It seemed like a good candidate to document so that's why I mentioned it specifically.

 

Having said all that, maybe a very quick guide to how to use IRC/our channel in the docs under http://docs.django-cms.org/en/develop/contributing/index.html might be useful. It could mostly link to existing guides (how to use IRC) but could include specific things such as the #123 trick and maybe a reminder on how to ask "smart" questions on the internet (for example: don't ask to ask a question, just ask your question and then have some patience for someone to notice).

Sounds good, wasn't sure if there were other undocumented enhancements or not beyond the #123 trick. I'm not an IRC power user, I only use it for #django-cms so a quick primer/reference of how to reply to people correctly, use the ticket shortcuts, etc would be a great resource for me at least ;)

 

Jonas