welcome script

[awaxa]

"diabot should have a welcome line for anyone he’s never seen before"

[jjasghar]

It should trigger on them saying something.

newguy: hey everyone
diabot: Hi newguy, welcome to #reddit-diabetes." It's great to see you've found us. Most of us are effected somehow by diabetes and this is a place for us to support one another. Please remember this is a place for support not criticism, and enjoy your stay!"

Or something like that. This might a good place to put a bit.ly to an ediqutte doc or something? I dunno.

[awaxa]

Our first bot (before the supybot) was a perl script my friend wrote that triggered something similar on joins from unseen nicks. It also highlighted the three users who had spoken most recently, which was very useful for me when the channel was much smaller and new users joining was infrequent but noteworthy. I don't want the bot highlighting people though.

I wonder if it would be better to have it welcome on joins rather than first messages. Maybe this would keep curious new users who are unfamiliar with IRC in the channel longer than the 30 seconds that they usually wait before quitting.

[jjasghar]

I wonder if it would be better to have it welcome on joins rather than first messages. Maybe this would keep curious new users who are unfamiliar with IRC in the channel longer than the 30 seconds that they usually wait before quitting.

Yeah I actually debated that in my head; my logic is on messages if you have some jackass join and part over and over you wont have the bot spam the fuck out of the room. At least with a message you see that they are at least that committed to be there. Adding a timer and all that crap'll make it over'll complicated; when just a parse of a "join" check the db, have i seen you, yes nothing, no have you said anything yes? post, write your name to the db.

Or at least something to that effect.

[awaxa]

I assumed that joins are what effectively trigger hubot to create a user in the brain (hubot show users) and that it wouldn't add a duplicate user if someone merely re-joins. If this is the case, I think the plugin wouldn't need to manage brain data other than perhaps a welcome message. Otherwise, the plugin would have to append to an array of users who've been acknowledged and your suggestion would indeed be simpler to implement.

I'm also starting to wonder about false positives and how easily they could be avoided by matching nicks that are similar but not identical, like awaxa and awaxa1.

[jjasghar]

I'd skip the matching nicks for the inital pass at this.

[awaxa]

WIP here: https://github.com/jjasghar/hubot-welcome