TWikiBot Replacement

TWikiBot was the name of a bot on the #twiki IRC channel. nightmarebot has been filling in for TWikiBot in some ways, but the requested features are starting to pull it away from its focus: MUDs. This is where a TWikiBotReplacement comes in. The TWikiBotReplacement was started by JasonHill in late May, 2006. The goal is to integrate an existing IRC bot with TWiki.

Desired features:

• Expand InterwikiPlugin-style links (nightmarebot does this)
• Provide a link to the current line of the IRC logs on koala.ilog.fr (nightmarebot does this)
• Write a log of the current conversation to a TWiki topic on demand, including the ability to specify how far back in the conversation to start the log
• !seen command, when was a user last seen active
• Notify channel on SVN commits

How it works: TWikiBot consists of three pieces:

• Mozbot IRC bot
• mozbot module - provides most of the functionality that isn't part of the standard mozbot
• TWiki plugin - provides REST interface for appending logs to topics

The mozbot module is responsible for tracking log requests. Once a log has been closed, the module uses the plugin's REST interface to append the log. The log is appended in comment format, directly above a %COMMENT% box if one is available.

-- Contributors: JasonHill

Discussion

MartinCleaver originally suggested using TWikiShellContrib. The downside of this is that the bot must have shell access to the TWikiSite it wishes to interact with. I'm not too familiar with TWiki's REST interface, but I think perhaps that would be a better means for the bot to interact with external TWikis.

-- JasonHill - 21 May 2006

"Write a log of the current conversation to a TWiki topic on demand, including the ability to specify how far back in the conversation to start the log"

This makes me very nervous, as it makes it far too easy to take things out of context. It also assumes that a person knows that something he or she has said in the channel is in a topic and that said person can participate in the topic.

-- MeredithLesly - 21 May 2006

When posting the log to a topic, I can have it provide a link to the current line in the koala.ilog.fr logs so the context is not lost. In addition lines starting with [off] will be ignored in the same manner as [LOGGER].

-- JasonHill - 24 May 2006

TWikiShell and REST are practically the same thing except REST implements a remote API and TWikiShell implements a local one. In concept stage I envisioned that TWikiShell should also be able to work remotely, although indeed the current implementation only works with a local installation.

-- MartinCleaver - 26 May 2006

See TWikiBot for the a description of the current bot.

-- JasonHill - 03 Jun 2006