26
C0D4
5y

devRant Welcome Bot

Project Type
Open source idea
Summary

devRant Welcome Bot

Description
Due to a splurg of the moment inspirational idea by @Sudocode We now have @WelcomeBot (Patent pending) So what does this bot do? Nothing yet! That's where this Collab comes in. Today I've launched a GitHub repo for the general community of devRant to contribute to what this bot should say to new comers when called upon. Any genuine contributions will be considered, the idea would be to have a community guidelines or similar as to what to expect from this place when a little green dot joins the party around here. So in 2000 characters or less, how should "we" greet a new comer?
Current Team Size
1
URL
Comments
  • 28
    - No hashtags on devRant. This isn't Shitter.

    - Tags can contain spaces and are separated by comma.

    - Don't just slap your fucking sausage fingers on the big "rant" button for a new post. Use the fucking appropriate category, you stupid asshole.

    - "devrant" is not "developer rant", dumbass. There are fucking ONLY developers here, hence no finance, marketing and HR folks with their rants. "devrant" is for shit about this platform itself.

    - devRant is not a replacement for Google or Stackoverflow. It's primarily for RANTING, you moron, hence the bloody name. Fucking Google your shit FIRST.

    - Other people do have internet, you retard. They don't need reposted shit from whatever stupid social media crap you're on.

    - Don't fucking whine for ++ so that you can make your avatar similar to your ugly and stupid face. Post fucking GOOD rants and comments, that's what gives ++.

    - Post in fucking English. English, motherfucker, do you speak it?!
  • 6
    @10Dev People in my company do compliment me for my social skills. Then again, my company pays me money. ^^
  • 3
    @sudocode who are you again? Lol
  • 6
    My two cents:
    @Fast-Nop @C0D4 Honestly, as much as I get why y'all would like to tell people to not do stupid stuff, as a newcomer if I immediately get plastered by a bot saying that I should NOT do [list of things that I don't even know about yet], it really wouldn't help my feelings towards the platform, because the implicit assumption is that I'm an idiot by default.

    It might be a reasonable assumption on average but *nobody* wants that assumption made about themselves. Let's not hurt dR's potential userbase and none of us have the right or authority to go around policing what dR is supposed to be about. That's up to @dfox and @trogus. (commenting on an annoying rant is one thing, writing a bot for it is quite something else).

    I'd rather have a nice positive message about what dR is about and how to use each category. Let's be polite and friendly here. I think @sudocode is on the right track, maybe make it a bit less in-your-face.
  • 9
    I agree with @RememberMe, none of these seem welcoming to me. I much prefer when people nicely greet someone, and if there does happen to be a case where someone posts something that they really shouldn’t, kindly tell them that.

    Some of my favorite devRant posts/comments are when a newcomer is greeted by the community in a nice way. I don’t think a bot responding with what seems like a wall of text/rules would help with that.

    I also don’t really think it would improve anything. We clearly spell out the guidelines for each post type when you try to post with that type. I think the people who don’t want to read it generally don’t read it anyway unfortunately.
  • 6
    I do think though maybe we can make the topics/rules more visible for new users without it seeming condescending or a turn off, so maybe we can think of how to do that.

    We’ve also taken a lot of action against spammers lately, but I think that’s a different group altogether.
  • 2
    @dfox Actually, the -- was supposed to take care of that as regulation mechanism, that's what the FAQ says. However, you decided to remove the -- capability for people who actually use it. Nice catch-22 right there.

    The result is that most notably the joke/meme category has become such a pile of trash that blending out the whole category is the only remaining option. And even that doesn't work for "devs" who already fail at the simple multiple choice test that a new post implies.
  • 3
    @dfox but dad! We Are Not Nice Ppl!
  • 4
    How about we totally change the idea of the bot:

    Someone mentions the bot on a post. For the bot to work, it MUST be the user's FIRST/ only post.

    Existing users can subscribe to the welcome bot.

    @welcomebot subscribe

    @welcomebot unsubscribe

    As to not clutter other places in devRant, the bot should have it's own post where you can comment this.

    Upon a user mentioning welcomebot, welcomebot will generate a comment on the new user's post with a list of all subscribers.

    "Hello <new user's uername>, there are some friendly faces that would like to say hello!"

    @<list of subscribers>

    Then, it will be customary for all subscribers to be friendly and leave an updoot, but the bot itself should NOT updoot anything (which would break the rules)

    How is that, @dfox @fast-nop @sudocode ? Friendly and still accomplishes the goal?
  • 2
    Oh, and just as a note: I think bots are annoying and belong on shitty discord servers. I would be upset if I saw a bot on my first post at all!
  • 0
    @Fast-Nop are you guys planning to automate it , it will be little tricky but we can start with a naive bayes classifier to find the perfect response
  • 0
    @dfox how about a moderator badge to current users of dev rant if someone new comes in the official welcome is done by these moderators this will keep things interesting enough
  • 5
    @hardfault Community moderation has already been discussed and rejected. We operate very well without them already, they are only a risk.
  • 1
    @hardfault Nah, moderation would just open a whole new can of worms that nobody wants to dive into.
  • 1
    Back in the days, we had @jAsE our human bot took good care of welcoming new people by simply posting:

    Welcome to dev rant, you'll love it here!

    also FUCK OFF

    I wonder what happened to him ...
  • 1
    @gitpush Legend says that he split his soul too many times by creating too many accounts and his life force shattered.
  • 3
    ☺️
    When your 2 cent idea turns into a active discussion - #wk211

    @fast-nop, I expected a list like that, although I'm with @RememberMe, let's not make it too condescending.
    They are green dots after all, and many do fail the multiple choice test.

    @dfox this wasn't an attempt to "fix" something missing, more of a welcome message to give a green dot an idea of what to expect and a quick guide on how things "run"... I don't know if that's the right word... around here, "--" a post or comments only go so far before we are auto banned from doing that, which removes the moderation of spam in its self some days.

    Possibly descriptive text on the post options (not the alert box) could be of use, for @fast-nop's multiple choice test.

    @AlgoRythm this could work, but I don't believe the first thing a green dot should see is a wild bot mentioning them, it may work if we had a private message system of some kind, but that won't happen.
    That feels more reddit / discord like.

    Plus trying to identify new users that aren't spam accounts isn't trivial, there's a lot of spam accounts in there and user id's aren't sequential (big holes between id's)

    But I do like the idea of a rant to introduce yourself too or into, almost like a mandatory post / comment before they can contribute to the wider community.
  • 1
    @AlgoRythm He will be missed, along with AlexDeLarge the guardian of the system, anyone with "stupid" rant, gets smashed lol
  • 2
    @C0D4 I really just think that we should make bots for gadgets (like @ highlight) but leave the devRant-y stuff (like welcoming newcomers) to devRant
  • 2
    @sudocode What is the Question category for then?
  • 0
    @Demolishun The question category exists solely for people to turn off!
  • 2
    @Fast-Nop On a semi-related note, we could definitely have a bot that automatically comments "Read the hint in the tag row and use it accordingly, this is not Twitter." on any post on which all tags begin with a #.
  • 0
    @Lor-inc This isn't aggressive, but it's not kind either (you're instructed by a bot, after all), and most importantly it doesn't annoy people who are actually capable of reading the hint.
  • 1
    @Lor-inc Or the # could be replaced with a comma if it isn't the leading tag. But that would require a code change in devRant - ain't gonna happen.
  • 3
    @Fast-Nop Firstly that would be a job for @dfox, second, people may use hashtags ironically, or to refer to preprocessor directives. I would prefer as little magic as possible.
  • 3
    @Fast-Nop I have become partial to your "newbie screwed up" roasts. If a bot did this it wouldn't be the same.
  • 0
    @Demolishun for being hit by the -- brigade!

    @AlgoRythm I can accept that this bot may have no use in the grand scheme of things.

    It's more that green dots usually have their first post as something I could walk into
    /r/programminghumour or /r/memes
    and almost guarantee it's at the top of the list, or is a "do my homework for me" post,

    That says something is unclear to what we do around here or maybe devrant has some great SEO for
    "fuck <language>" - this could be a high possibility.

    I didn't see this being any more then an introductory post to how to mingle with the broader community before being banished the land of downvotes.
  • 1
    @C0D4 Even though your observation is statistically correct, we should never make such an assumption about a newbie. At least not in such a direct way.

    Mainly because if someone did actually make a good post, they'd rightfully be upset about it and we'd drive away valuable members from the community.
  • 1
    @Lor-inc that's why I would be against automating such a process as per @Algorythm, It still needs human intervention to decide if a post warrants summing a bot or not.
  • 4
    I can understand the representative from Deutschland (@Fast-Nop) in the matter of being frustrated by low quality rants that should not be here to begin with by people that do not bother to read and understand proper ettiquette when it comes to posting in our beloved platform and believe that his heart is in the right place. The gentleman is just passionate in his wording as he is in his technical proficiency and let it be known that the representative from Texas fully supports his sentiment and idea.

    The court will move with a motion for appeal as it was presented by the owner of the product in question (devrant) for the sake of making the sentiment expressed by the German representative as a more welcoming message as long as the general, and very well presented ideas from my colleague adhere to its original sentiment.

    All in favor of moving forward with the motion please take your votes.
  • 2
    @AleCx04 LOL doubleplusgood! ^^
  • 1
    "general community" sounds like something for the GitHub Community Organization on GH! Interested?

    Thinking about moving my bots to the organization too... We'll see
  • 0
  • 1
    <@Skayo>
    Also I could contribute to the bot a bit! (Depending on what language you're going to use)
  • 1
    @Skayo you already did 😇

    Your gist solved a couple of issues I was having with the lmgtfy and lmddgtfy bots.
  • 2
    Some great ideas here.

    I think it’s worth thinking about what the main problems are to actually solve.

    To me, tags entered incorrectly on rants it not a problem that needs to be solved with this and seems unnecessary/waste of time. Even in the small amount of occurrences right now, someone entering tags in the wrong format doesn’t really impact app experience for the general community. It mainly just hurts the searchability of their content. And from most of the instances I’ve observed, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Feels like content that doesn’t use the correct tag format is generally lower quality from what I remember. If it really is a big issue, it makes more sense to just normalize the tag structure and fix the format automatically than bother everyone with reading info about it.

    Beyond that, seems like there are some good ideas of things that can be broadcast in a welcome message. I will say though one of the first lessons of UX is people really don’t like reading instructions. That’s why for something like this IMO it’s critical to keep minute things out and focus on what’s important.
  • 0
    @dfox One nice UI improvement would be to prevent double postings when double clicking the "POST" button. There should be a status variable in the handler to ONLY launch the action if the button handler hasn't already been called (debouncing).
  • 1
    <@C0D4>
    Just wanted to let you know that I've released a rewrite of my old devrant api docs!
    See the collab here:
    https://devrant.com/collabs/...

    Thought you might be interested!
  • 0
    Is it ready yet?
    or, may I take over this Idea?
  • 2
    Like the idea.
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