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owenconti / livecodingtv-bot

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Gist? #18

Closed toferj closed 8 years ago

toferj commented 8 years ago

You indicate that help is available via Gists, but you don't explain what that is. I managed to find out that it's associated with GitHub somehow, but I cannot find any information on what my gist username or gist access token would be. I'm guessing that my gist username would just be my github username, but how about the access token? I've been searching the interwebs for the last 30 minutes including github's own help, and I cannot find any references to a "Gist Access Token".

You're readme assumes of the reader too much knowledge of how github works. :(

toferj commented 8 years ago

I just now found this to help with generating a gist access token... why was this so friggin' hard to find? It didn't even come courtesy of github help. I just had to keep googling... lame.

R4ver commented 8 years ago

I think it assumes that people knows about github/gist and access tokens etc. cause this site is mainly use by coders and such. Then again detailed explanation is always a plus nonetheless

toferj commented 8 years ago

I am a developer. I don't use github on a regular basis... and this was the first time I'd ever heard of gist. It's just better not to assume things. Everyone is new at some point.

R4ver commented 8 years ago

That's true

owenconti commented 8 years ago

@toferj When I google "gist" the first three results all relate to Gist, and the third is the "About gists" page.

If the bot were still using Pastebin instead of Gist, would you have known what Pastebin is? If so, would you have made an issue here for it?

toferj commented 8 years ago

You seem to believe that I didn't try to solve this problem on my own. I did. And after about an hour and a half of googling I finally found this page helpful (https://github.com/condemil/Gist#generating-access-token). And yes, if you decided to use Pastebin instead of Gist and didn't explain how to use it (since it's essential to the setup of the code you wrote), I would absolutely have opened an issue to it here since what I was doing was trying to get YOUR help. The help provided by the Gist is also not very helpful. I found certain aspects of it very confusing. If you'd care to know details about what exactly I found confusing, hit me up and I'd be happy to go into further detail. :)

As it stands, once I was able to get your Chatbot properly installed and running, none of the commands supplied in the livecoding.tv blog article on how to set it up (http://blog.livecoding.tv/2016/04/09/livecoding-tv-chat-bot-guide-2/) worked. Probably a user error? I'm sure it was, but as I told RavingAPD, everyone is new to things at some point, and your directions assumed a level of knowledge that not everyone will have. Even in that article from LCTV's blog there are mistakes. I pointed these mistakes out to them, but they have not updated the article.

IMO, good instructions will hold the reader by the hand and walk them through the process. It will make no assumptions about their knowledge of specific pieces, or if it does it makes very clear what assumptions its making and where to go if those assumptions are wrong, and the reader needs to fill in gaps in their knowledge.

In the end, when I contacted LiveCoding.TV support for help, the support tech suggested a different bot entirely as "their favorite bot", and even though that one also had very little instruction to set it up, I was able to get it running based on the example in the github repo itself. Also, the developer of that bot was very responsive to my request for help.

I may be coming off sounding a bit like a dick here. I don't mean to. I just had lots of trouble trying to get this bot installed and running, and then once it was running, it didn't really work (or it didn't seem to), and every avenue I turned to for help to sort this out fell a bit flat. I had trouble finding information from GiHub regarding access tokens for gist (which is their fault, not yours), but I was only doing that so I could see if the help you were providing via Gist would help with my continued confusion at the time. It sadly did not. I'm sure it's a great chatbot (it won the chatbot competition after all!), but it just didn't work for me.

owenconti commented 8 years ago

Thanks for your detailed reply.

I agree that the documentation overall could and should be better. However, the bot is no longer supported, worked on, or used by myself.

I have updated the README to indicate it is no longer supported. Can you please link me to the chatbot LCTV directed you to? I will update my README to point users in that direction instead.

Thanks

toferj commented 8 years ago

You bet.

I didn't realize that the bot wasn't being maintained or anything. I totally understand that.

The bot I was pointed to was one by AskMP (https://github.com/AskMP/LiveCodingTV_Chatbot). This simple bot was the basis for the one that Phanxgames (https://www.livecoding.tv/phanxgames/) uses on their channel. They have totally game-ified it.

I'm going to attempt to do a similar project starting with AskMP's base bot. I'm a Node.js noob though, so it will be a learning experience for sure.

Cheers :)