COGS Bristol

As those of you at last weekend’s LAN already know, I released the next of my Meet the Committee series at the LAN.  This time we Meet the Sysadmins. You can click on the video below a couple of times to go to the full page on youtube. Comments, ratings, and passing it onto like minded (TF2-crazed) friends would be most appreciated. Enjoy!

– WildFire

A minor COGSBot update is happening this evening.  Nothing incredibly exciting, mostly fixes and improvements, but I like to keep everyone updated with the world of COGSBot and what’s changing.

• Resurrected (and slightly improved) the !mani feature, offering a quick and easy overview of everyone running for committee positions at the upcoming AGM.  You can private message any committee member and ask them to add your manifesto to the list
• Added SSL support – the bot now connects to the network using an SSL link
• Improved integration with !lan (and added helpful easy-access committee view of liftee:lifter ratio)
• Improved code which checks if a user is identified with NickServ – on rare occasions the bot could conclude that someone was not (when they actually were…)
• Improved user online tracking code.  After netsplits, the bot could sometimes be left with the ridiculous notion that some users were offline, and so the bot would appear to ignore them!  This should not happen anymore
• Fixed a bug in the scheduler where two !reminders at exactly the same time would sometimes not trigger properly (thanks Wyrm for the report on that)

-WighFigh

Hello everyone.

I have been beavering away on some shiny new features for COGSBot for a while now, and the time has come for another upgrade.  Changes follow:

• !whois has been overhauled.  No longer do you have to PM your requests to WildFire — you now can manage your own !whois data yourself!  You can change your !whois setting through the bot’s standard settings interface (i.e. !set whois).  As always with !set, typing just !set followed by the setting will tell you what you need to do (though in this case it’s pretty obvious!)
• As well as being able to update your own !whois status, you can now get more information about other users from their !whois entries.  You can find out their online status, along with their current spam prevention status.
• !tell has been implemented, which allows you to leave messages for people who are not currently in the channel.  The next time the recipient joins the channel, your message will be relayed to them.  N.B. a new setting has been added which allows you to customise how the bot alerts you to messages left for you (!set tell).  You can also disable tells entirely, so that people are unable to leave you messages.
• If a COGSGuest joins and types !help, they now get customised help content to assist them changing their nickname
• The bot can now !inform groups of people rather than just the channel.  I can send message to all the channel moderators, for example.
• [internal] Fixed some odd behaviour when dynamically reloading some plugins

As usual, the IRC statistics have been updated as well.  Along with updating these, I’ve created some new ‘Rankings’ which offer a more exciting view of the stats.  Click here to view them

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.

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.

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