the ?squadmessage

[Nycle]

Trench Wars forums really isn't the place to be when it comes to billing commands. It's not Trench Wars who offers the commands starting with ?, but the SSC database. So whine to them.

[Jason]

There are other billers out there (mainly Catid's biller) which offer a ?squadmessage-like command. Trench Wars uses the subgame biller, as do all SSC zones. This biller, as of the current version, does not support squad-wide messaging. It is in my opinion that TW won't be switching over to a new biller any time soon. As we all know, PriitK is very stuck in his ways. An update to subgame any time soon (within the next 6 months even) is highly unlikely. So, writing a bot to handle squad-wide messaging is a viable option.

I'm also an idiot. I was slightly doubtful that I could code such a bot with the TWCore, but I most certainly can. My original plan involved tying in my bot with the biller, which is silly. I don't know what I was thinking. So yeah, I can write this bot, and if I see more support for the idea, I'll do it.

Keep the yay's and nay's coming folks. I'd like to be sure as to whether or not this would be a worthwhile venture.

[Nycle]

YaY!

[Fortress]

:: is to #
as
?message is to ?squadmessage

amazingly simplified i'll send for this to be an analogy on the SAT's

if :: is to # then ?message is to _______

[Hero*]

i like it

[Kings]

Popeye wants it.

[Jeansi]

command should be restricted to squadowner only tho.. same as the other squadcommands.. the abuse would be mad if every1 could do it to any squad

.. (c) ZeUs!!

[IceStorm]

would be nice but not needed.

[Awesome]

its nice for squadowners to be able to do it

example:
to let everyone know of the scheduled times for twl matches coming up that week

[Nockm]

How would you do this Jason? Look in a player database and filter for all entries who are joined to squad X? If so, where is it, and how would you connect to it?

What if a certain squad member decides not to wear his squad name, this is very common and would cause him/her to be left out.


A bit off-topic, but I remember there was this bot thing that basically held a detailed profile about you, email, ICQ#, etc etc etc. Many many years ago, but I remember it, then all of a sudden it just vanished =)

[Jason]

It's quite simple Nockm. The bot would allow a player to create a new usergroup. The player who initially creates the usergroup claims ownership of the group and is inserted into a database. After the initial creation, all users who wish to join the group submit a request to join. The owner of the group must approve the request before a user is added to the group (upon approval the user would be added to the database). Once added to the group, any member can then leave a message for the entire group. (I could also work in a privileges system in which the owner of the group can limit who can leave messages and who can't, just in case you have a Jerome in your squad.)

When a user who belongs to the group logs on, he/she can type a command to the bot and see all of the current messages. I suppose I'd implement the ability for group owners to set the total number of messages to store before it starts deleting old ones. Or maybe I could do it according to a certain amount of time that has elapsed, which the owner would also be able to set.

On top of those things, I think I'd like to set up the ability for group owners to do "announcements." These would be akin to stickied threads on the forums. They would display at the top of the message list and would stay up until the group owner removes them.

Oh, and back to the priveleges thing, I'll probably do it so that the initial owner can promote other users to a more priveleged status (akin to forum moderators vs. forum administrators and what have you) as well as demote them. And ownership could be granted. Yadda yadda yadda. I could go on all day.

So yeah, I started out saying it's quite simple, and it is, there's just a lot I want to do with this. Basically it comes down to storing stuff in a database. I haven't decided if I'm going to do one big database with all groups, or a separate database for each group. To prevent abuse, I think I'm going to make it so that you can only own/belong to one group at a time. At the very least, I'm going to limit ownership of a group to one per user. I don't want the database(s) to get insanely large.

Please feel free, any of you, to comment on what I've said. I'd also like to know what you wish to see in this bot. Once I have a solid idea as to what it is everyone is looking for in general, I'll set to work.

[Noah]

A yay from me Jason..

Jason > Priitk

[Awesome]

nockm you could also just use TWDBot0 i guess, and add a new function to it so that a squad captain can use something like !squadmessage and it'll ?message everyone on your TWD Roster for you

but only make it accessable to people who are listed as squad captains or else people would over use it i think and might cause some lag with the bots :x

[Jason]

Hmmm, you have a point there Awesome. I'll chat up the right people and see about the possibility of that happening. I'm not too sure the uppity ups are going to go for it though. If you want a squad messaging system that is at all robust, it's going to require a lot of database entries. I don't think Myth/lnx/whoever wants the TWD database too cluttered up. But like I said, I'll toss the idea out there, and we shall see!

In the event that they either a.) allow me to add this functionality into the TWDBot, or b.) don't allow me to and I end up writing my own bot, I'd still like to hear what kind of features you're looking for. If we're going to have such a system in place, it might as well be a damn good one.

[Jason]

Speak of the devil, I just talked to Rifleman! He's done pretty much a complete rework of his Message_Bot and he's bringing it back online on August 20th. It's available to all SSC zones I believe, so hopefully we can work out some sort of deal where we just use that, and I can work on an even cooler project 2d's been brainstorming. If we don't work something out, we'll definitely put together this bot for you guys.

I'll drop another post here after I have more details.