Summer Announcements (2019)

All out of character announcements and news about the channel and site.
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Nymphetamine
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Summer Announcements (2019)

Post by Nymphetamine »

There have been a slew of changes going on that we'll now address in this post.

Discord Server

BDI has had a Discord server for a while, but beginning in May of this year, Gudrun began to set it up as an actual RP server. It's thoroughly gated behind a bot check, an age verification, and a number of role selections, but has already withstood its first server raid. Gud really did the bulk of the work and even began promoting the server, so that it attracted a handful of new users, which we are quite happy to have. While there are currently no plans to move to the Discord platform entirely, we will be eye balling that possibility as IRC continues to decline. There are a number of reasons to make the switch, but we are not yet at that place with our IRC population being what it is.

If you want to check out the Discord server, the invite link is https://discord.gg/9Dzn8g7 . Due to Discord's Terms of Service, we have made the Discord server an 18+ area. Given some of the subject matter of the IC channels, and especially the OOC channel, we decided to err on the side of caution on this one.


Orwell IRC<->Discord Relay

This is really kinda the thing that brought me back from my hiatus to work on. Though, I say I worked on it, this was really all Chris. Most of my contribution was submitting tickets to my shell host to actually be able to run the bot.

Orwell, named after the drunk town crier because it's funny to imagine him shouting all of the relayed messages, is working great. He's set up in all of the IRC BDI channels, neatly connected to their Discord counterparts. There is a little bit of a bug in the fact that long messages from Discord are being clipped when posted into IRC by a matter of a half dozen or so characters. It's an annoyance, but there isn't any possible way to fix this, due to the bot's usage of a remote library. A ticket has been submitted to the bot's Github, but at this time, we have seen no updates on the matter.

Right now, we're still trying to solve some basic functionality. Relaying system/status messages from IRC clutters up the Discord, but we understand that knowing when someone changes their nickname or joins/parts a channel is important info that the mods needs to know. At this moment, there is no way to limit the joins and parts to a separate channel on Discord, but we're still looking into it. Facilitating statistical info from IRC to Discord for the purpose of knowing who's connected or not is a concern of ours which we are still working on.

So if you see any messages from Orwell, he's relaying from one platform to the other.


Murphy's Repurposing

Towards the end of intermarrying our IRC channel and our Discord server, Murphy the bot has been repurposed. As running the stats parser is useless when half of the active players will show up as Orwell, and having no way to change that, I decided to change Murphy's functionality since he no longer had to log the channel. We've added to Murphy a !seen script that responds to users on Discord as well as IRC. This is meant to help people, especially those on Discord, with figuring out who's on IRC, if they had nick changed or disconnected and such issues. Please feel free to use !seen <nickname> on IRC or Discord to get current info about IRC users.

We've also added to Murphy a !wiki script to fast search for articles on the wiki. This script is limited, so it's less a search engine and more just fetching the link to specific pages, so you'll need to know the actual page name. However, the wiki can be set up for redirects, so we will probably be adding some to the major categories to make pulling up pages easier on users. Like the !seen script, !wiki responds to Discord users as well. Because that's a thing that's important to me, and I have slave labour to carry it out for me. So real props to Chris/freakuancy for all of the script editing, bot setting up and maintenance and all of the super heavy techy stuff.

Since we needed to be able to ignore the clocktower on Discord, the script has been moved from Murphy to Woolly. So now imagine Woolly bleating the time every hour.
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