SoylentNews

had a go at scripting a little quick & dirty irc bot for soylent

requires sic (http://tools.suckless.org/sic)
if you're using debian: sudo apt-get install sic

#!/bin/bash

chan="#test"
log="test.log"
pipe="log-pipe"

trap "rm -f $pipe" EXIT

if [[ -f $log ]]; then
    rm $log
fi

if [[ ! -p $pipe ]]; then
    mkfifo $pipe
fi

substr="End of /MOTD command"
joined=""

sic -h "irc.sylnt.us" -n "log-bot" <> $pipe | while read line; do
    if [[ -n "$line" ]]; then
        echo $line >> $log
    fi
    if [[ -z "$joined" ]] && [[ -z "${line##*$substr*}" ]]; then
        joined="1"
        echo ":j $chan" > $pipe
    fi
done

exit 0

also posted on the wiki @ http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/index.php/User:Crutchy#IRC_logging_bot

NOTE: This is just a draft copy of my post, likely still incomplete. Once edited and reviewed, I'll post to the main index.

Ok, so first, I want to apologize that this is a few days late. Due to real life insanity (involving, but not limited to, 30 hours of flying, horrible jetlag, and seasickness), I wasn't able to get this discussion started when I promised, so please accept my deepest apologizes. Anyway, here's the moderation discussion, as promised. I've made it clear multiple times that the current algo is something of a temporary hack. I've been reading comments on my journal, and on the articles we've had discussing in-depth.

Before we begin, there are a couple of things I'd like to go into first before we go into rewriting the algorithm. A lot of people have suggested alternative moderation systems (i.e., something Reddit like, or a tag-based system) instead of trying to "fix" slash's system. While I'm not inherently object to replacing moderation wholesale, it would require someone to actually implement a new system, get it setup somewhere, let people review it, and then perhaps roll it out to the site. As the saying goes, talk is cheap. I'm personally not going to replace what I see as a "good enough" system without the community deciding that they want it, and that requires that said system exists to be evaluated. If someone is seriously interested in still perusing this, I invite them to drop by #dev, and discuss it 1:1.

*big exhale*

Right, now that we got that out of the way, I'd like to address what I've seen the biggest concerns towards moderation. I recommend that people read my writeup about the current system before diving in, as I will be referring that post considerably.

I've got some pretty graphs here that show how points are being spread through the system, and that, for the most part moderation is mostly working as adversed.

*FIXME, put graphs here*

Point expiration: Oh boy, people really have let me know about this one. I've written a fair bit about this, but to sum-up, modpoints with a short half-life *are* a good thing. On Soylent, we post upwards of 10-20 articles a day, and once an article is no longer in the "top 10" so to speak, the number of new comments essentially drops into single digits. With a smaller userbase, we need lots of mod points in circulation to make the system work, and even then, generally half to 3/4th of all modpoints expire out without being used.

*graph to points expiration table*

That's not to say that the current four hour period isn't short. My largest concern at the moment is that any large increases of mod point expiration has something of a cascading effect. At any given moment, we have a specific number of slots of people who can be moderators, and if someone doesn't bother to moderate at all, that slot is effectively taken until the points go "POOF". I'm tentatively willing to increase the duration to six hours, to relief some of this pressure, and then see how moderation spreads are affected. Any large scale increases in the expiration however means making more of the userbase eligible to moderate at a given time. I'm open to thoughts on this one.

After a minor problem with virtualbox (f*ck you nvidia) I got the slashdev virtual machine going. If you're running a 32-bit host OS (as I do), you can probably still run the 64-bit slashdev VM. You just need to make sure your CPU supports it (Intel VT-x or AMD-V) and that it's enabled in your BIOS (usually disabled by default). GIYF.

When you're importing the vm, gotta make sure you don't hit the checkbox that reassigns mac addressses on network interfaces, cos eth0 won't show up in ifconfig and you won't have internet access.

After a quick flick through the bash history I realised that sudo works with the "slash" user.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install gnome

*hides* (cli is awesome, but on its own is claustrophobic for me)

login under gnome classic session (default ubuntu session fails to login, not that i mind)

Ephiphany works as a web browser, but I prefer firefox/iceweasel:

sudo apt-get install iceweasel

Can also use synaptic with same password as slash user.

To start apache (compiled per slashcode install instructions, not from repositories), open a terminal:

./apache/bin/apachectl start

Full command is (just for the curious):

/srv/slashdev/apache/bin/apachectl start

Start the slashd (slash daemon) - gleaned from bash history:

sudo /etc/init.d/slash start

Close slashd terminal window (will continue to run in background).

Open Firefox:
http://localhost:1337/

Apache public directory:
/srv/slashdev/slash/themes/slashcode/htdocs/
It contains mostly links to files in the /srv/slashdev/slash/ directory.

It was nice of NCommander to make the slash user home directory as /srv/slashdev... thanks for that

Tried to register a new user but doesn't seem to work. Seemed like maybe MTA not configured. I use exim4 normally on my debian boxen (removes postfix):

sudo apt-get install exim4
sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

During configuration, mostly self-explanatory (select defaults for all except make sure to select option "internet site; mail is sent and received directly using SMTP"). Tested password retrieval with exim4 ok. As per usual check your junk folder in hotmail etc.

Sagasu is an awesome search tool:

sudo apt-get install sagasu

After install, you'll find it under Application -> Accessories
Change your file pattern to *.pl or whatever (can just use * if you want), select "/srv/slashdev/slash" as your search directory, uncheck match case, enter a search string such as "sub displayComments" and click Search.
Couldn't find sub createEnvironment though (is called at the bottom of a lot of perl files). Anyone got any ideas?

Also recommend installing mysql-workbench.

If anyone finds anything wrong with any of this stuff please let me know.

edit: the other reason why i prefer to install gnome is cos gedit is a great little development tool.

edit: thanks heaps to paulej72 for the git advice. here's the script provided by paulej (i just added the git pull, as also mentioned by paulej):

#!/bin/sh

cd /srv/slashdev/slashcode
git pull
make USER=slash GROUP=slash SLASH_PREFIX=/srv/slashdev/slash install

rm -rf /srv/slashdev/slash/site/slashdev/htdocs/*.css

/srv/slashdev/slash/bin/symlink-tool -U
/srv/slashdev/slash/bin/template-tool -U

/srv/slashdev/apache/bin/apachectl restart

Note: This produced a couple of errors for me. Don't run this under sudo cos the script has a hissy fit (I had to do a "sudo chown slash:slash -R ./slashcode" to recover).
Also, I use this command to execute the script:

bash ./Desktop/deployslash.sh > ./Desktop/deployslash.log

more so that I can have a squiz at what happened if it goes pear shaped.

9-mar-14
paulej72: If you hand install to /srv/slashdev/slash/themes/slashcode/templates/dispComment;misc;default you need to run /srv/slashdev/slash/bin/template-tool -U to update the templates in the database. Should also restart apache when touching the tempates

Hi,

As promised, here is my update about the IRC cloaks and how we're going to enhance them.

It's important to note, by default your hostname/IP's first (few) segments get masqueraded by the IRC daemon (IRCd), but you can also get an entirely different cloak by messaging HostServ and requesting one[1]. However, some people have made a good argument that the default cloaking mechanism isn't enough, and thus I began my journey finding a better way.

I went to look at the current cloak module[2] that we're using and found an easy way to improve it. However, I'm not a star in C and I've asked stderr for some advice. He then offered to write a cloaking module for us, that works independently from the original one that was linked.

He has made significant progress and we're aiming to deploy the module on our TestNet later today (you can get on the test net by connect to irc.sylnt.us on port 7779 or port 8889 [ssl]) and, naturally, test it.

Once the module gets marked as "Safe to use" we'll deploy it on irc.web-refinery.com (SN's second IRC server, that's currently linked to irc.sylnt.us, I set it up because some people were getting packet loss due to some issue along the route from them to my server in Germany). Once that's done and confirmed to be working properly - which it should, if it passes on the testnet - it'll be deployed on irc.sylnt.us.

The reason for first deploying it on irc.web-refinery.com is simple: even though irc.soylentnews.org is a round robin, it only gets low traffic, so it's safer to deploy it there first.

More information about the cloaking module will be released in time.

I hope I have provided enough information, be sure to keep an eye on my journal as more information will be released in time.

Thank you for the feedback Soylenteers and special thanks to stderr!

Another thanks to everyone on IRC who commented on my entry here to improve it, amongst others: Kobach, Konomi, Mattie_p, Soyforlent and everyone else I might have missed, English isn't my native language and that's probably a good thing.

[1] /hs request a.cloak or, if your IRC client doesn't respect the IRCd's aliases replace /hs with /msg hostserv
[2] Source here

work in progress

a minor difficulty i'm having with wrapping my head around slashcode is figuring out where functions are declared. i can use a search tool like sagasu, but i've done something similar to this for php so i thought it would be a fun perl project.

objective: parse code files in a directory tree and output page with linked index of files and functions

doc.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
use strict;
use warnings;

##########################
sub doc__main {
    print "<!DOCTYPE HTML>\n";
    print "<html>\n";
    print "<head>\n";
    print "<title>Slashcode Doc</title>\n";
    print "<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\">\n";
    print "<meta name=\"keywords\" content=\"\">\n";
    print "<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html;charset=utf-8\">\n";
    print "</head>\n";
    print "<body>\n";
    print "<p>blah</p>\n";
    print "</body>\n";
    print "</html>\n";
}

##########################
sub doc__functionTree {
    my($structure, $allDeclaredFunctions, $allFunctions, $allFiles) = @_;
}

##########################
sub doc__recurse {
    my($structure, $allDeclaredFunctions, $allFunctions, $allFiles, $allTreeItems, $caption, $type, $level, $id) = @_;
}

##########################
sub doc__aboutFile {
    my($structure, $allFunctions, $allFiles, $fileName) = @_;
}

##########################
sub doc__aboutFunction {
    my($structure, $allFunctions, $allFiles, $functionName) = @_;
}

##########################
sub doc__linkFile {
    my($allFiles, $fileName) = @_;
}

##########################
sub doc__linkFunction {
    my($allFunctions, $functionName) = @_;
}

##########################
sub doc__allFiles {
    my($structure) = @_;
}

##########################
sub doc__allFunctions {
    my($structure) = @_;
}

##########################
sub doc__declaredFunctions {
    my($structure) = @_;
}

##########################
sub doc__loadStructure {
}

##########################
sub doc__parseFile {
    my($structure, $fileName) = @_;
}

##########################
doc__main();
1;

I'm a perl noob. Hopefully if I do some journal writing on my experience it will help keep me motivated.

Got some sort of perl server configuration going. Google not very helpful since most guides are for mod_perl pre 2.0 and apache foundation docs are jibberish to me (maybe I'm just stupid).

Anyway, here's a conf that I kinda butchered up based on a bunch of different sources:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName slash
  DocumentRoot /var/www/slash/
  Redirect 404 /favicon.ico
    <Directory />
        Order Deny,Allow
        Deny from all
        Options None
        AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/slash/>
        SetHandler perl-script
        PerlResponseHandler ModPerl::Registry
        PerlOptions +ParseHeaders
        Options +ExecCGI
        Order Allow,Deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
  LogLevel warn
  ErrorLog  /var/www/log/slash/error.log
  CustomLog /var/www/log/slash/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

By the way, this is for Debian Squeeze.

My first hellow world script was also a bit more of an adventure than expected. Most tutorials leave out a header in examples.

/var/www/slash/test.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
use strict;
use warnings;
print "Hello world.\n";

I could (probably should) have used a text/plain mime header, but it worked nonetheless.
Also I can apparently use the following to add a path to @INC

use lib "/var/www/slash/Slash";

I downloaded the soylent/slashcode master branch from https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/archive/master.zip so that I could have a squiz and see if I could be of any help with debugging etc, but although I can read some of it, I need to go to perl school before I can contribute.

My bread and butter programming languages are Delphi and PHP.

This explains a lot about the beginning of slashcode functions that aren't familiar to me:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17151441/perl-function-declaration
Perl does not have type signatures or formal parameters, unlike other languages like C:

// C code
int add(int, int);

int sum = add(1, 2);

int add(int x, int y) {
  return x + y;
}

Instead, the arguments are just passed as a flat list. Any type validation happens inside your code; you'll have to write this manually. You have to unpack the arglist into named variables yourself. And you don't usually predeclare your subroutines:
my $sum = add(1, 2);

sub add {
  my ($x, $y) = @_; # unpack arguments
  return $x + $y;
}

Is it possible to do pass by reference in Perl?
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=6758

Subroutines:
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsub.html

As the SoylentNews site has gone live, I've seen several URLs posted for access to different "areas" of the site as well as to other supporting resources. I'm using this space to collect the SoylentNews links I've found, in no particular order. Some are for historical reference, others for current access/reference.

The following links may be somewhat dated or obsolete:

• Development Forums
• Development Activity
• Bugs - List
• Bugs - Submit
• Wiki
• GitHub
• Web Chat - ##altslashdot

Alternative URLs listed here were found at the top of http://irc.sylnt.us/

• sylnt.us - wiki
• sylnt.us - forum
• sylnt.us - code
• sylnt.us - IRC Logs
• sylnt.us - Got Bugs?
• sylnt.us - Who's Who?
• sylnt.us - Leave your IRC comments here

If you are new to IRC, a good place to start is the www.irchelp.org web site!

More #Soylent IRC-related links: NOTE: issue "/msg NickServ help" to get started.

• IRC (toplevel)
• #soylent - General main channel
• #editorial - Home of the editors
• #dev - Home of the developers
• #sysops - Home of the system administrators
• #help - For IRC related questions
• #trivia - For some trivia
• #idlerpg - Idle away!