Frozen Synapse IRC help bot

In the IRC channel #mode7games hosted on irc.maxgaming.net I’ve had set up a help bot.
Its purpose was to provide information that players often come to seek in the channel. I made it greet in a PM everyone who joins the channel and present itself and how it could help with commands and definitions, but only once. The next time the same person would join, it would have to PM the bot to get any message from it.

It ran successfully for several hours, I heard no complaints. Then 3 channel operators Meneth, tehshrike and Chemeleon decided that the bot’s behaviour was "annoying" to users.
How is the bot different from a real person that you know or don’t know who PMs you when you join ? It’s not. And in both case you’re not annoyed, you’re curious to know what’s the message. The only time it can be annoying is when it is repeated and that’s why I took care of messaging only once. I even hired a programmer to make a custom bot that would do exactly that. The bot would tell this fact in one of its definitions. The 2 founders of Mode 7 (omroth and nervous_testpilot) knew about the bot and didn’t say anything against it. The 3 operators were aware that the bot was a help bot and that it only greeted once, yet they kicked it and banned it twice.


Now why did I set up this bot ? 4 reasons:

1) The other bot (Shapeform, owned by Void) most participants don’t know that it exists because it doesn’t have a bot name and is "passive". Even when it is used or says something automatically people don’t realise it’s a bot. They also don’t know what are its commands nor where to find them. As you can see, it would have been hard to make a more useless help bot. Finally most of Shapeform’s definitions are only links to the wiki and a tournament site.
Conclusion: the best way to help people was to use an active bot. It’s particularly useful when there are too many participants for a human to answer them and when there there’s nobody who can answer. It’s like a FAQ, once you write it you save everyone a lot of time.

2) Part of of the definitions and the wiki articles it links to, spread erroneous information that newbies take as correct which can lead them to not understanding what happens in game and losing. I can’t bear that. Conclusion: I must establish the thrush in a way or another.

3) Void said he’ll let me operate Shapeform but never did so, then later he said he would help me set up my own bot if we couldn’t agree on how to run Shapeform. We didn’t agree and he never helped me. Conclusion: I must do it myself.

4) Shapeform is mostly maintained by Meneth and operated by him. Meneth also administrates the wiki (owned by tehshrike) and makes most of the edits. And Meneth is an admin of the tournament site and he organises the tournaments. This is called a monopole. Just like when a company owns enough TV channel and newspapers it owns the media and decides what makes or not the news, it controls what you can know. It’s the same thing here, not only Meneth creates most of the content but he has the power to exclude any information (and even user) and he does. I’ve done a lot of stuff for the community, it’s difficult to get an idea of it if you haven’t been a regular since I joined but basically I’ve spent most of my time on FS related projects since March 2011. (here are all my forum posts and the FS site I made) But strangely you won’t find any mention or reference to it on the wiki or the bot. Try if you want. I say Meneth but it’s actually a small group of people who basically do as if I had never contributed. Imagine if I had written the entire wiki but nobody would mention it, weird huh ? Conclusion: if I want people to be aware of what I’ve done for them I must promote it myself.



Then there’s Chemeleon, owner of the channel and admin of the server. He told me that active bots were against the unwritten server rules and against the netiquette.
As I’ve showed above not only my bot wasn’t annoying (contrary to Shapeform which sends messages to all participants every now and then) it was actually helpful.
He basically explained that owners could do whatever they wanted on the place they owned because they owned it. Imagine that you go camping in a camping for several days, then the owner brings up an unwritten rule and if you don’t follow it he throws you out. Seems not a big deal but imagine how stupid and arbitrary that rule could be, and imagine the consequences for you and your relative if you had to leave abruptly the camping (and never come back). Sensed people will agree that services need an agreement between parties and that whatever wasn’t in the initial agreement is meaningless. Because the channel or the forum is not like a room in my house that I would decide to lend you then not lend you anymore, those places are MADE for people to come in and stay. I’m sure you’ve seen rules when you joined other channels, but here none.
He also stated that even omroth and nervous_testpilot had no say in this (I recall that they are Mode 7’s founders and that the channel is the official one of their company !).
Can you imagine that a third party could decide who does what on Mode 7’s forums ? inconceivable huh.

Finally, the reason why I made it work in PM instead of announcing in the channel is because I believe that it’s disrespectful to bother 50 persons when only one needs something (again as Shapeform does, can you imagine the mess created by just 2 users trying out the various commands in public ? luckily they don’t know them).
So you see, it’s those who pretend to defend something that actually disrespect it but accuse others of disrespecting it (where have you seen this before ?...)



So there, if you never found what you were looking for or found it way later or never knew this or that existed, those are the reasons why.