Camail
commented
8 years ago It was either an issue with permissions or not properly killing other instances of the bot, because those were the only things that I changed in between testing the command and it worked.
The former seems unlikely because if it couldn't write to the db at all, then any persistent storage commands would be affected, but the tell plugin was fine. The latter seems equally as unlikely because I've made sure to have only 1 instance of the bot running (and only needed to close numerous instances when figuring this problem out), but maybe a disconnected instance somehow had the seen table tied up and kept it locked all this time. I don't know why it works now, but it does.
The seen table in the database stops updating after a few months, seemingly spontaneously. I've had 3 long term skybots (first two were not mine, the current one is) where the .seen command will stop working after somewhere around a year. I looked at the seen table in my current database and it stopped updating 2 months ago.
Everything else using that database seems to be working as usual.