COGS Bristol

Now that everything is back up and functioning again, it seems like a good time to hit the ground running with another upgrade of COGSBot. It’s a big one!

Requested Stuff:

• There are now multiple settings for how the bot notifies you. You can change how the bot alerts you for these three things:
  - Reminders
  - Game notifications
  - All other chat
  You can use this new feature to selectively choose which types of communication can ‘highlight’ you. I.e. you might not want your computer to beep at you for general chatter from the bot – but you might want it to alert you to !reminders which you set
• …reminders you say?  The bot now supports a !remind feature. You can have the bot remind you about future events at an arbitrary time in the future e.g. “!remind 1h30m Put out the cat” would remind you to put the cat out in an hour and half…
• You can now list who is on a game list by adding ‘list’ on to the end of a game command e.g. !tf2list will show you the people who are subscribed to the !tf2 list. It will not tell them that you want to play…
• !away now has persistent storage and saves people’s away status across bot restarts. Previously it would lose people’s away status if the bot had to restart
• Altered the ‘NSFW’ link warnings to make them less prevalent
• Now supports a !tempban feature for channel moderator use. It allows easy banning of someone for a desired period of time, after which they are automatically unbanned

Internal Stuff:

• When users are setting their.. settings.. they can now find out what their current value is by doing !set <value> (where <value> is one of the setting names)
• The !away feature now has improved time formatting i.e. !away 2h30m would set you away for 2 and a half hours
• The bot can now join in the actions with /me fun
• The bot now doesn’t highlight people in the gaming channel anymore, i.e. if they are !away, they will get no personal notification about the game
• Time was refactored to support a combination of either hours and/or minutes as described above
• Prevented any awkwardness by stopping lists being created with names which end in either ‘add’, ‘del’, or ‘list’ – The three modifiers which users apply to the end of lists to do things with them

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug in gaming lists where they could sometimes be triggered by people who were not in the list. *cough* Morgyn…
• Fixed a bug where the bot would occasionally miss messages from people, or think that they were not authenticated and would not respond to them at all, forcing the user to re-type the command.

As most of you know our server provider was hacked recently, and all of our website services were taken offline as a result. We’re back now, but we still have some restoration work from backups to do…

So some folks said there would be a physics BBQ this Friday. This is therefore a late announcement that COGS will be crashing the party (with invitation) and that we can probably be found trying not to let our pale, pale skin burn somewhere in Royal Fort Garden in the afternoon, while munching burgers.

This will lead on nicely to our social for the evening, starting with a meal (for which you will already be booked if you’re on the list) and then followup chatter in Bar 100. For the more robust, we will then be following COGS tradition and going to All in One for cocktails.

Today phpBB was updated to the latest version, which was released a few days ago. Wordpress was updated to the latest version at the same time to minimise disruption. Normal order is now restored.

Additionally, a bunch of spam users have been removed from the forums, and we should have made it a lot harder for spam users to register themselves again for the time being (here’s hoping…)

The post exam “mini” LAN is looking to be quite a hot event with 22 signups so far! This Saturday in AR2 we’re looking to have quite a few outsiders descending upon our fair and pleasant aisles – that’s right, some of us loonies have been out “socialising” (albeit at LeachLAN) and making “friends” with “people.” Then apparently some of them saw fit to blast the living cabbages out of us another time by LANing with us once more. Make them welcome!

This LAN we’ll once again be trying some sort of forum-based food order, and we’ll try and have some of the sillier games going (especially another bout of the all-popular armagetron) so make sure you’ve got your source and WC3 mods installed! Also, since we’ve not played it for what seems like ages, I think I should announce CARBALL.

I’ve heard rumours on the internets that some people think I am a girl. Some people think I am a slave; most of you seem to think I am a slave girl.  Over-active imaginations I say.

In this iteration:

• I now have a scheduler which I can use to do whatever I like at any time of my choosing
• By requesting !lan you can now find out exactly when/where the next LAN is and how many people are attending. This is linked in with the web signup system at http://www.cogsbristol.co.uk/signup
• By requesting !server you can find out what servers we run and more detailed information about our TF2 server i.e. the current map and how full the server is.  If you are not currently playing TF2 on our server, go and join it now!
• I can now be used as a vessel through which life and death can be bestowed upon thee.  By which I mean to say that COGSBot can giveth ops away, as COGSBot can revoke them. Or something.
• I was receiving complaints from some individuals that I occasionally m0d mistakes. Big deal. These are rectified from now on.

- COGSBot Announcer

Internal stuff:

• I can now reload various parts of the bot without having to restart it. No longer will it need to be shut down to make small changes
• Everything is now being logged which will open up avenues for cool stuff in the future
• Support for coloured text (hah – yes you heard it right Wyrm!)

Requested stuff:

• Bot now supports ‘danger words’. I.e. the bot warns when people post potentially NSFW links
• keke, you’ll find out soon enough

Bug fixes

• It was possible to create lists with capital letters in. These lists were unusable
• in some of the bot’s output, commands weren’t being displayed in bold in certain cases

Stressed about exams? Can’t think of ways to procrastinate? A LAN is clearly the answer! Rapidly drawing closer is the 16th of May exam-LAN, which had to be emergency moved to MR4 due to marauding desks.

Come along for the usual mix of computerised hilarity. We’re planning for a few new crazy games such as Armagetron and Gang Garrison 2, to further help relieve your worries. Sign up using the link at the right!

A while ago a number of people said to me that they were annoyed that they had to put their phone number and address down even if they didn’t need a lift. This surfaced when we added the checks to make sure we were getting valid phone numbers etc, since you could no longer put “077URMOM” in the phone number field. Mentioning no names there, except Robbo’s.
In actual fact you never had to fill in these fields, even if you asked for a lift, for this very reason. When we designed the system we knew we wanted to, at a later date, allow you to sign up without these details if you didn’t need a lift but require them otherwise. In the past week this has now been finalised, and I’ve learnt some new 1337 javascript skillz and it makes the fields disappear when you don’t need them – sweet or what? I know, I know, you can shower me with praise in the following ways…

I’ll understand if you want to switch between the different lift options a few times to witness the magic (I certainly did) but just make sure you pick the right one when you finally submit

I worked upon our IRC bot quite a bit over the Easter weekend. [Hurray for mobile internet on train journies].

Aside from a couple of bug fixes, and some code to try and prevent us waking up to a scrollback full of ping timeout…join…ping timeout from certain individuals, the thing I’ve been working on is a statistics module.

Statistics is quite a big addition to the bot. So large in fact is this update, that for the time being, you aren’t even able to tell the difference. I’m going to wait a short while until I’ve collected a good base of data before I make a front end for statistics available to everyone.