As always, check them out at http://www.cogsbristol.co.uk/stats/

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!

-WiFi

– WildFire

• 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

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

• 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!

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.

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.

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.