rdearman wrote:Thought I would post here rather than a PM in case other people are interested. The link to the Github page is indeed the source code for the current SuperChallenge bot. It uses the Twitter API and you can download the source code from github for the bot. After you have the bot you'd need to set up a twitter API account and then you can start your own bot and testing it. The 6WC bot was written with different code so the interface and commands were slightly different. (I'm sure someone here could give you a list of commands and what it did)
In addition, we're always looking for improvement of the SuperChallenge bot. For example, it doesn't currently play well with 3 letter ISO codes or for language family groups. There are some suggestions for improvements on the github page for the SC bot. One of the things we thought about was trying to make the bot more generic so you could simply put things into the DB for configuration and remove some hard-coded stuff. For example the list of commands it will respond to is hard-coded, it would be nice if it loaded commands from the DB. So generic bot could be simply reconfigured to employ the 6WC commands and display results.
One thing we did do was to make a "Docker" out of the SC bot so that it would be easier to host. All of our forum and the current SC bot are all docker instances on AWS servers. This should make it easier for developers to run an instance on their machine with Docker.
It has some known issues, like for example it doesn't really know how to go back and collect old tweets if the tweet collection daemon is stopped or interrupted. This means people have to go back and re-tweet scores which is frustrating. It would be nice if it could match the last posted update with tweet, and process all tweets after that time. To be fair this is a rare occurrence but it does happen.
As far as hosting goes, that isn't a problem. If you did a new 6WC bot, then we could host it on our AWS platform. But again we'd turn it into a Docker to ease changes. We've got some scripted stuff in the AWS backend which allows us to deploy code by grabbing a copy from git hub and building, configuring and testing automatically. (Super smart EMK stuff, nothing to do with me!)
The SC bot is written in PHP and uses MySQL as the DB.
Thank you for taking the time to reply directly. I'll look into writing another bot most likely, after looking over the code for the SC bot. I looked around the forum and found someone talking about writing a bot for a new 3 week challenge, but then the OP stopped posting days after starting the thread, and that was back in March. I've asked about the status of that; maybe there is no need for new bot code.
As for the SC bot itself, I made a token contribution in the form of a pull request addressing something I noticed while reading the code. I've also got a couple questions about the bot in general:
1) How do you manage it? There doesn't seem to be any admin pages or anything of that nature in the code. Raw SQL queries and log files?
2) I read somewhere on the SuperChallenge thread the bot is not able to send twits and that's why its Twitter feed looks empty. Is that the case? I ask because the bot has all sorts of reply-to-twit-type calls in the code as part of its message handling and should be generating visible content.
About your current hosting arrangements. Could you tell me a bit more about how the DB is hosted, specifically? Is it a standard RDS MySQL instance (i.e. not a custom EC2 instance persisting to an EBS volume and managed by Docker)? And is it actually MySQL (i.e. not MariaDB)?
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Are there any 6WC participants reading this thread? I'd love to know what you'd expect/want from a new bot, and specially if you'd actually be interested in one.