SoylentNews

The Editors write:

Programmers should be lazy people, at least to the extent that it is better to write a piece of code to do an often-performed task, rather than manually doing so repeatedly. The various devs that visit SoylentNews are no different, especially in our IRC channels. To expedite various useful support functions, help keep the site running efficiently, and to provide amusement to citizens of IRC, "bots" are frequently used. We asked crutchy to conduct a review of the bots that are in use, so we would like to thank him for getting us a list to build this article.

Firstly, there is a table of the bots on our IRC bots wiki page and the code for many of them is available for your perusal, and perhaps tweaking for your own use.

Although most of the IRC action is in #soylent, anybody who is curious or wants to help the IRC 'botters' is encouraged to "/join #" and make your mark there.

Read on for an overview at the multitude of bots already in our arsenal:

The "batcave" (IRC channel "#", reached by typing "/join #" when on our IRC network) is described by crutchy as "bot central", and his journals contain loads of stuff about the 'exec' bot, which actually has its own wiki page.

There are bots to tell you the title of a pasted url, one that will tell you the weather, and many others. Although there is a lot of information in the wiki, here's a brief summary of all the dev/bot work you may have missed in IRC:

• xlefay was a huge inspiration for all the bot activity in Soylent IRC
• Loggie is something xlefay set up. It logs any channel it's invited to at: http://logs.sylnt.us/
• There's a couple of Eggdrop bots (wikipedia, help files), like ciri and Regurgitator
• ciri is the responsibility of arti. Its purpose is described as 'Entertainment' but that belies its power. It can do unit conversions for distances, weights, and temperatures, bin to dec/dec to bin conversions, google for news, weather or general information from IRC and much, much, more.
• Regurgitator (run by juggs) has various rss feeds in the #rss-bot IRC channel ("/join #rss-bot"). This is a great way to find your next (first?) story submission for the SoylentNews main page; log on to this channel to see announcements from various tech news sources for the stories as they are released. If the channel is a bit slow — and it depends on the news sources for its data — look at the logs for this channel and just browse the last few days. There is bound to be something in there that will pique your (and our!) interest.
• monopoly/hedonismbot (by chromas) automatically gives the title of any URL pasted into IRC and is written in pascal: https://github.com/chromatos/pas
• sedbot is an awk script allowing "stream editor" (sed) commands in IRC, currently run by chromas, but developed by FoobarBazbot, source on github
• exec is "a bot that runs in a CLI that connects to the Soylent IRC server and executes other programs and facilitates their interaction with IRC". It has many functions like a voting system, lots of wiki integration, and a "meeting assistant". Some of which are detailed on crutchy's journal, but the most information is available on the wiki page: IRC:exec, source code: github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot
• bender spits out SoylentNews headlines into #soylent, and is "some kind of python thing"; Landon has the source code here: https://github.com/lfowles/jsonbot
• WikiRC is a bot in #wiki that trumpets all changes on the SN wiki (though it's currently not working).
• There are a couple of translators: exec uses google translate and there's MrPlow...
• MrPlow is from TheMightyBuzzard, it's a perl bot that translates into Klingon.
• aqu4 is an awesome bot that does various useful things, and some not so useful including chucking rotten burritos. Subsentient wrote it from scratch in C: https://github.com/Subsentient/aqu4bot
• Konomi isn't around here much lately (she's still in #boxedfox on freenode though) but, she has been working on a perl bot.
• mattie_p was also working on a MUD that was connected to Soylent IRC at one point — although it was not a "bot", it was very popular in the early days of SN for a bit of light relief between crises.
• Also, http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRCiv, something crutchy has been muddling about with for a while, is an IRC-commanded CIV game.

We're not done yet... there's more!

• diego (by juggs) has a stats program that is responsible for the generation of PieSpy relationship maps for #soylent: http://stats.sylnt.us/social/soylent/
• arti also has a stats program under development at: http://antiartificial.com/stats/soylent/soylentnews.html
• There's also a SoylentNews comment feed in #comments and a github feed in #github that is linked to our slashcode repo and the github repos of some of the 'botters'. Crutchy has also written a bot to handle the github feeds for the SoylentNews slashcode repos in #dev.
• tama (hosted by arti) is the 'yo mama' bot that resides in the batcave (#) — it is a bucket bot: https://github.com/zigdon/xkcd-Bucket

Honestly there's so much that happens here we may have missed some things. If you haven't had a reason to join us in IRC, and this article aroused your curiosity, here's the right-in-your-browser webchat link: http://chat.soylentnews.org/, and the IRC page (for configuring an IRC client) one more time. Even if IRC bots aren't your thing but you are still doing some cool dev work, feel free to submit a story and tell us about it.