In conjunction with the IRC shakeup, latest bot update brings:
- Moderator support. Our trusted moderators are non-committee users who have access to ops if they need to sort anything out, and they can also silence (tempban) people for a short time
- Topic support. I’ve created a relatively large set of utility stuff which lets us edit the topic easily and safely. People make their topic changes “offline” (without actually changing it in the channel constantly). When they’re happy with the topic preview, they can update it in the channel. It handles stuff like delimiting and colouring automatically so people don’t have to worry about it
- Auto voicing for committee members
- When people set reminders, tell them what time the reminder will be sent
- Refactor to allow commands to know what channel they were called from so some things are a bit neater
- Improved logging: now logs what the bot says as well. COGSBot wants to be in the statistics too!
A bit like a cabinet shakeup, but with fewer expense scandals.
For a while now the committee and I have been thinking about the IRC op-regime and how to make it sleeker and more effective – and indeed several people have made comments saying that there ought to be some changes. So, this weekend, there will be!
The visible effect will be that there will no longer be as many ops in the channel. So that people know who they are, the committee will be voiced, and apart from that there will normally be no ops except for COGSBot. Then if something op-ish needs doing, those with permission can become an op, do whatever needs doing, then go back to normal. As well as not filling the channel full of ops, it’s my hope that this will prevent rashness with regard to the doling out of kicks and bans, as has sometimes been problematic in the past.
It’s time for another release of COGSBot. So, what’s changed? Well, uh, not really very much… not with the bot itself anyway…
COGSBot has been gathering a lot of data over the past while and it was time to do something useful with it all. So, I can now present our very own IRC statistics generated by COGSBot. They have pretty graphs and lots of interesting numbers. I hope you all enjoy looking at them.
There are future plans to create many more interesting types of statistic but for now this should do!
To help support these stats in future, the bot now has better logging support (such as rolling over to a new file). Also added is a !stats trigger which will provide you with a link to the statistics page. You can find the statistics here.
