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zigdon / xkcd-Bucket

Bucket is the channel bot for #xkcd
http://wiki.xkcd.com/irc/Bucket
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Factoid aliases are, perhaps, too transparent #97

Open dgw opened 7 years ago

dgw commented 7 years ago

Say I have an alias: green eggs => Dr. Seuss

If a user triggers green eggs, Bucket will pick a factoid from Dr. Seuss and say it, using Dr. Seuss instead of green eggs.

For example:

<User> green eggs
<Bucket> Dr. Seuss can't possibly be wrong!

Ridiculous example aside, the point is that Bucket can seem to be talking about something completely different. Why don't triggered aliases use the name of the alias before the verb, instead of the name of the main factoid group?

zigdon commented 7 years ago

It depends what you mean to do when you alias A to B. If the idea is that B can always be used for A, it makes sense. For anything else, it breaks down.

I feel the example alias is invalid - why would you do that?

On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 3:17 AM dgw notifications@github.com wrote:

Say I have an alias: green eggs => Dr. Seuss

If a user triggers green eggs, Bucket will pick a factoid from Dr. Seuss and say it, using Dr. Seuss instead of green eggs.

For example:

green eggs Dr. Seuss can't possibly be wrong! Ridiculous example aside, the point is that Bucket can seem to be talking about something completely different. Why don't triggered aliases use the name of the alias before the verb, instead of the name of the main factoid group? — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub , or mute the thread .
dgw commented 7 years ago

Yeah, it was a terrible example… my only excuse is that it was really late and I was too tired to come up with anything better.

But the most frequent case I see people "complaining" about on my instance is aliases like usernick_mobile => usernick, where triggering a factoid about someone who happens to be on their mobile/alternate nickname spits out a factoid using their primary nick. That case isn't a big deal IMO, but it's the most common.

To be fair, most aliases point to targets that almost exclusively use <reply>, so it's hard to dig up a real-life example that isn't nick-related. But I'm sure I'll come across one at some point, and then add it here.