SoylentNews

So, mod-bombing is becoming a problem. Where mod-bombing is defined as blowing a bunch of moderator points on one person's comments in pursuit of a personal vendetta. I think we're pretty much all in agreement that this type of behavior is NOT what the moderation system was designed to do and can't be allowed to continue.

So, I, personally, not anyone else on staff or the site as a whole, would like some input to use to further refine or outright change my opinion on how to deal with the matter. Bear in mind that I am not the person who gets to decide this, just the guy who would likely be coding it up.

At the moment my favorite idea is that after N downmods from person A to comments made by person B, person A be presented with a page offering them the choice of removing all their moderations from this set of modpoints or to continue on with the knowledge that an admin WILL be checking their moderations for today with the possible consequences of reversal of their moderations and their ineligibility to receive mod points again for a number of days ranging from 1 through infinity.

What say you, SN?

If you want to practice or test your typing I've been working on a little webpage game for this purpose. No login or plugins required, but of course it needs javascript as it measures keystrokes.

Thanks to Paulej72 for finding a bug in safari, which is now fixed.

It uses excerpts of public domain texts, like sherlock holmes and moby dick, which I pilfered from the very excellent project gutenberg.

Any suggestions or bug reports or whatever comments are most welcome. I intend to improve the game further, such as adding optional logins to remember your score, and also links to the whatever book you're typing from at the time in case you like it and wish to read the whole thing.

~help <alias>
gets first 3 lines from section of this wiki page: http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRC:exec_aliases
followed by a url

~staff meeting
outputs paragraph in site news slashbox containing the word "meeting", with paras delimited by <br>

scripts can call lib.php function bot_ignore_next() to set a flag in the bot that tells it to ignore the next message, which is useful if outputting aliases that you don't want to be processed (such as for ~help)

~count <nick>
counts number of privmsgs in channel. also indicates over how many days and average of privmsgs per day.

This text should be RTL if overrides are not stripped out.

some recent goings on with the exec bot that generally lurks in #Soylent channel on irc.sylnt.us:

- sed supports regex through use of preg_replace (FoobarBazbot's awk script no longer running under exec)
- reserved alias for logging script
- disabled ping script for auto-restart cos it was a disaster (i think i fixed the problem by disabling the ping until connection is established but not going to bother testing for now)
- implemented support for bucket_append messages, which allows creating lists from multiple concurrent processes without fouling each other (needed for users.php which builds lists of channels, nicks and nickserv accounts using list, who and whois irc commands)
- refined the weather script a little as a result of some feedback (thanks to those involved)
- put weather and time functions into lib files to make them accessible from a new welcome script that can (if enabled) show weather and local time on joining a channel (if your nick/location is registered using ~weather-add or ~time-add)
- created switches.php in an attempt to make enabling/disabling features on a per channel basis a little more uniform (used by sed and welcome scripts)
- script created to add suggestions to the wiki, using ~suggest (appends to a section of an article, with bullet formatting)
- added stats aliases ~first, ~last, ~find-first, ~find-last and ~count that make use of cached chat logs
- added interface for adding/editing/deleting ~define sources
- added ~killall admin command to terminate all scripts/programs running under the bot process
- admin setting to ignore/unignore nicks added
- added script start timestamp template for the exec.txt file

hoping to eventually get the nickserv account checking stuff in users.php to a point where i can use it to fix up the player authentication in irciv cos i really wanna get back into that

haf fun :D

===
https://github.com/crutchy-/test
http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRC:exec

exec now supports a reserved <startup> alias, which at the moment executes a script that triggers a sequence of aliases related to starting SedBot(2) in #Soylent and ##.

the <startup> trigger fires when the bot attempts to identify with nickserv, and like other reserved aliases can't be triggered from irc.

my intention is to make scripts to enable easy management of the current sedbot.awk script, unless FoobarBazbot returns beforehand in which case he'll be able to take the reigns.

the advantage of the <startup> alias is that if exec is disconnected temporarily, sedbot will restart when a connection is re-established.

a test was performed by pulling the network cable out of the machine hosting exec and leaving it unplugged for a while. when the cord was eventually plugged back in, exec came back up and restarted sedbot without any intervention.

https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/irc.php
https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/irc_lib.php

bot admins now have a little more control over scripts that are executed

to see a listing of running scripts/processes:
~ps
this will generate a list in the format:
[$pid] $shellcmd

to kill a process listed by ~ps:
~kill $pid

if the bot is restarted (~restart) or quits (~q), all processes (including any children) will be killed

bot source code is here: https://github.com/crutchy-/test

if you would like to log an irc channel, you can /invite loggie.

as a backup, exec also has a logging feature.
you can /invite exec to a channel, or if you're not op, go to another channel with exec already in it and do '~join #yourchan'
then if you want to switch logging on, do '~log on'. you can switch off logging using '~log off'

logs are publicly accessible here: http://irciv.us.to/irc_logs

if you want exec to go away, do '~part' from within channel, or '~part #mychan' from any channel with exec in it

everyone uses and abuses poor ol' sedbot in irc, but currently it's only working in #soylent. its also in #test but isn't working there for some reason.

for anyone who just can't live without sedbot functionality in other channels, you can do "/invite exec" and then "~sed on" to enable (or if sedbot makes a grand entrance you can do "~sed off" to disable). if you're not a chanop, you can do "~join #chan" from any other channel with exec already in it (usually #soylent).

works similar to sedbot. doesn't do vowel replacement or regex though.

Check out http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/Feeds for a trial concept in article summary development.

Thanks go to prospectacle for his ideas.

Eventually feed sources will be read from here: http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/Feed_sources (currently read from a file on the bot host).

For the curious:
Bot script: https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/irc.php
Feeds script: https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/scripts/feeds.php
Wiki script: https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/scripts/wiki.php