Here’s a list of the updates to our various sites & services:
Our forums and home page have had a re-skin – for a while we’ve wanted to make an attempt to change things so that there’s less of a disconnect between the two portals.
IRC statistics have been updated and can be found at the usual place
A new COGSBot feature, !scratch has been added. If you often find yourself connecting to IRC from different machines and are fed up of losing or emailing yourself links to webpages, this may be of interest to you. As long as you are identified with NickServ you can use “!scratchmessage” to save your own personal list of stuff. You can retrieve this scratchpad (as long as you’re identified) anywhere by typing !scratchpad
A !committee trigger has been added to COGSBot, which allows you to attract the attention of a committee member if you need to bring something to our attention, e.g. we got the date for an event wrong. Or you found our cash box. Or whatever..
We’ve handed a nice ergonomic keyboard to COGSBot, as the demands on typing are high these days. Hopefully this is going to help cut down on those spelling mistakes that have been cropping up.
Feedback on any & all of the above is most welcome. Feel free to get in touch with us on the forums or IRC.
Just premiered at COGS LAN 1 yesterday afternoon was the next Meet the Committee series video. This time we Meet our Vice President, 2kah. You can click on the video below a couple of times to go to the full page on youtube and watch in 1080p if you so desired. As always your comments, ratings, and passing it onto friends would be most appreciated to help spread this video around a bit. Enjoy!
I’ve updated the statistics for our IRC channel today. It’s been a fair bit longer than usual since the last update, sorry. I’ve added a few new ‘ranking’ thingies, and also added better IRC to HTML formatting. It now supports the IRC bold formatting codes, for example.
As some of you may have noticed by the upcoming events we’ve had in the sidebar for the past week or so, we’ve been trying out a new events calendar system. This is now live, and ready for use.
The sidebar on the right of the page now has a quick list of the next few events coming up. There’s also a fully interactive calendar available on the Calendar page (also accessible via the tab bar at the top of this page). As well as an interactive calendar, this page also contains a link to our ICAL feed, should you wish to automatically sync this calendar with your mobile device etc. so that you need never miss another COGS event again!
We’ve decided to try out giving moderators more visibility in the channel. This led me to improve the usergroup system, so that we can add/remove people from groups (e.g. the moderators group) easily.
Support for list maintainers has been added. This allows committee to grant power to maintain a list to another user who would not otherwise have permission to edit any lists. E.g. someone who isn’t on the committee may be ‘in charge’ of an event, and need to update description etc.
!whois will tell you if a user is committee or moderator
[bug] fixed problem where spam protection wouldn’t trigger until an extra message was sent, leading to some confusing situations..
[bug] fixed problem where it would sometimes describe time as “1 hours” instead of “1 hour”
[bug] fixed crash which could occur under rare circumstances (though it never did live) if someone was double-tempbanned
[memo] check SQLite versions on new hosts before migrating
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!
February 10, 2010 | Posted in IRC Bot,News, Tagged
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)
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.
