Adding commands

[kimroen]

Hi Jeremy, Here's something that would be neat:

Make a way for admins to add helpful messages to the bot in irc, and then a way for me to modify them later. This is particularly for helpful messages to the people of the chatroom.

I am talking about both messages directly to people, or general announcements for special occasions. Sure I could add those and then send a pull request in github, but I don't think that would be timely enough.

An example:

I message the bot directly something like:

!helpful add calendar "Hi! You can find out all about when the shows will be streaming live if you go to http://5by5.tv/schedule. You can even add them to your Google Calendar so you never miss a show!"

Then I would trigger that in the chat with

!helpful calendar faith5by5

Which would send that message to Faith.

The other flavor (general announcements) would be something like this:

!helpful delay "Unfortunately the upcoming show is currently delayed. Stay here and/or check out @danbenjamin and @faitherina on twitter for live updates"

Other ideas:

• Put the chat room in some kind of "state" (like the delay-message above) where everybody who joins gets the set message once? Prevents people from wondering. Could be nice.

You would have to be an op to add new messages to the !helpful-command.

[mutewinter]

I like the idea a lot. I've had thoughts along these lines also. I had thought of a dynamic title-suggestion like area that could be named. This would show up on the website.

e.g Merlin grabs his guitar and people can start typing song suggestions with a command like !post song Freebird

These both revolve around the idea of the bot storing a state that can be accessed by users. Messages from admins could be shown on the homepage in a sticky fashion much like message boards. Fleshed out a bit more, it might be possible for both of these features to be combined into one.

[kimroen]

That is very cool as well! I'm not sure I see any further use-cases for that (and Dan would have to be excited about and use it), but I might just not be seeing the potential. Maybe for Geek Friday, where audience participation might be a bit more relevant.

When it comes to my suggestion though, that would be chatroom-exclusive. Just to inform, help people out and save me and other OPs from typing the same thing over and over again. (Normal people don't look at the topic).

[kimroen]

Maybe adding the stuff in-irc is not the best idea. How about a document of some sort with whatever syntax that is loaded in?

[mutewinter]

Yea a document would probably be the best route. In a nicely parsable format like YAML or JSON.

The file would contain a key value mapping of the !helper command to the text to send. It would still need the capacity for one-off messages that are only useful for that day or hour.

[kimroen]

It could have an active:true/false setting or something like that though.

[mutewinter]

Good point, guess I was thinking about the ones were the show is delayed for a fixed amount of time (2 hours). Also, you probably wouldn't want to have to bug me every time a new message needs to be added to pull and reboot the server.

[kimroen]

Well that's the point here. Commands should be able to be added, removed and modified live. That's why I was thinking adding them in IRC in the first place.