IRIS chatbot poll results

[eco-mono.livejournal.com]

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who weighed in on the chatbot issue a couple weeks back. I've made a couple changes which I hope will address everyone's concerns.

The biggest change that has been made is that the bot now only responds to IMs. It will still be in chat to make announcements of shift changes and new characters, but will ignore any attempts to interact with it there. Interactive commands such as "who is X" or "what shift is it" have to be issued, and are responded to, privately.

Second off, I know that a few people are really uncomfortable with a bot that speaks on its own, even only to make occasional announcements. If you're one of these people, I've added a special command for you. Simply IM "avoid me" (with or without the quotes) to the chatbot (AIM screenname "brbnightshift") and, while you are in chat, it will not make announcements publically; it will instead IM those people who haven't opted out. In this way I've tried to maximize the ability for someone to simply ignore that the bot even exists, if such is their preference.

Finally, since I don't really want to keep spamming the Lounge with this stuff, I'll point you all in the direction of brbnightshift, a journal I made for handling feature announcements and stuff in the future. Anything else I have to say about the bot will go there, and there's also a feedback post for questions, comments, concerns and suggestions.

Once again, thanks for everyone's help in making this thing more polite, and please feel free to contact me if you have any other issues.

Comments

[hughes]

Geez, how do you do all that? D8 HOW MUCH WORK IS IT TO PROGRAM THAT STUFF.

Anyway, the shift-announcing and new characters sounds pretty crazy-awesome even if I'm the one who makes the shift changes but you know and fairly non-invasive, though I'm really happy to hear you added in a feature that allows people to ignore it if they want, since I know a lot of people were concerned about that. Of course, I'm probably going to be one of the people abusing the hell out of this thing in private IM, since I'm so bad at remembering SNs in general. XD;

Anyway, again, I can't imagine how much work this all has been to program, and thanks for making the effort to coordinate this to people's preferences!

[eco-mono.livejournal.com]

Actually it's not that complicated, once you know the language. The hardest part was probably the thread scraper (to support "where is x") but that's all actually code that I wrote, like, over a year ago for a different project that never panned out. Thanks for all your support for this. :D

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

Sounds cool! I'll definitely be using this, so thanks for all the work. Good call to let people avoid it if they want, too--hopefully that will help with some of the concerns that were raised in the last post.

[host-club-honey.livejournal.com]

I think that's great :) You've put a lot into it and if people don't want to see/hear it, they don't have to. It's nice that you took everything into account. :) I'll try it out! I do like the idea of linking the aim SN to "who" they are. Would it also be possible to be able to ask it things like "who plays _______" since a of times I find myself rummaging through the info page to find it and i'm a lazy little thing. ^^; Thanks for all your work!

[eco-mono.livejournal.com]

"Who plays X" is totally possible! I'll add it to the list of features to do... thanks for the suggestion! :)

[boyking]

Oh, that's nifty. :D I can't believe you actually managed to do all that, hahaha. That's incredible. ♥

[blinkinghell.livejournal.com]

....are you an alien? This is some crazy awesome technology XD

*likes the bot*

[kizna1200.livejournal.com]

My mind is boggling as to how you even managed to do all that! It sounds so complex!

[otnemememento.livejournal.com]

You are freaking rad for doing this, and you really hit all the issues- PMs, making it avoidable for people who are freaked out by it, etc. Wonderful job! :D

Thanks for all the hard work! I intend to put her to a lot of good use.

[tiassa]

I think that sounds like an excellent way to accommodate what everyone wanted. Bravo, and good work.

[demyx.livejournal.com]

YAY! Thank you so much for the IM support and stuff! >3< I can't wait to bug the hell out of because I'm going to need it. LOL But yeah, all those changes sound great. ♥

... so, can you still ask it to doomface in private IM? I'm not planning on being rude and copy/pasting it to people but that face cracks me up personally. 8(

[thebigkaboosh.livejournal.com]

*GAPES AT*

You are fantastically talented. @___@ This bot is a wonderful idea, and I will be forever marveling at how you managed to customize it like this. THANK YOU. :D

[141-12.livejournal.com]

OH MAN I HAVE ABUSED IRIS SO MUCH TODAY and I'll probably keep abusing the bot a ton more in the future. But I just want to chime in with everyone else who has said this is really awesome and useful