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What bots would you like to see on Lemmy? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, I'm learing python and I was thinking about createing Lemmy bot.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I'll reply first on more general grounds. In my opinion, bots...

should only reply to posts/comments when explicitly requested to, through a standard approach.
should be properly tagged as bots, not just their username but also some interface element. And they should never behave in a way that mimics human beings.
should have short, succinct output, that doesn't force other users to scroll past a lot of junk.
should only have a descriptive output (it gives you info), not prescriptive (it doesn't tell you what to do).

Now, actually answering your question:

a bot that links manga, anime and LN references to MyAnimeList, MangaUpdates etc. pages, like u/Roboragi does in Reddit.
an unit conversion bot, like @[email protected] said, that also works for cooking units. (Specially when Americans say stuff like "half cup of onions", for me it's the same as "a random amount of onion"). I volunteer myself to help out gathering units for that.
a simple Wikipedia link bot, that gives you a short excerpt of the Wikipedia link.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

r/fanfiction and r/HPfanfiction have a fanfic link summary bot. you do linkffn(STORYID) or linkao3(STORYID) and it posts a summary. was useful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I would have never guessed how to request the bot, if you didn't show it. That's another reason why I think that there should be a standard way to request bots, it increases discoverability. For contrast, Roboragi:

{this} looks for anime
looks for manga
]this[ looks for light novel
|this| looks for visual novel

You probably wouldn't guess it from the fanfic link summary bot either.

I think that a simple common syntax that could be used is @!bot-name [options] ["]data to process["], at least when users are requesting it regardless of community. It's hard to hit it by accident, but still easy to type, and flexible enough to allow multiple bots to follow it. So for example:

@!fanfic-link-bot ao3 STORYID // looks for STORYID in Archive of Our Own
@!animanga-bot ln "story name" // looks for a light novel called "story name"
@!units-converter-bot grams "five cups of flour" // converts five cups of flour into grams
etc.

Then if community moderators are allowed to call bots to perform functions automatically, without the user requesting them, they could also set up synonyms as shorthands. for example people in c/fanfiction could simply type "ffao3 STORYID" instead, less keystrokes for the same result.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

on r/fanfiction a link to the bot's info is provided on the sidebar:

Want to link a fic in a comment? Use link bot!

https://github.com/FanfictionBot/reddit-ffn-bot/wiki/Usage

But I 100% agree that something more standard would be called for for something more multi-purpose

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

And you made me realise something: why the hell are the FanfictionBot, roboragi, wiki linking bot and the likes different bots, if they perform the same underlying task (provide link and summary)? We could have one bot to rule them all.

(Sadly I know why. Because Reddit never bothered to provide users with functionality. So they developed this functionality in parallel, wasting their development time with unnecessary redundancy.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

GNU units to the rescue! https://www.gnu.org/software/units/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

...wow.

I just installed it. I was expecting something like "ah, it knows that a cup should be a certain amount of mililitres, but what if I ask it in grams? Then I put "1 cup sugar", "grams"... and it returned 200g. It couldn't find flour so I used butter, 226g. It works!

Checking /usr/share/units/definitions.units, the devs had the insight to add a lot of cooking stuff to it. Also a way to define your own units. The syntax is an arse but I guess that the bot could handle it.

This would be great as the "guts" of a really good conversion bot.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I was thinking of running an instance which houses just bots. In theory, that'd make it easy to have an easy to remember URL and usernames, like [email protected] or something. If I can get a URL that makes sense I might consider something like this. It'd keep it small enough to call, and make sure they're always 100% intentional.

This is mainly because I don't want to be a source of annoyance for anyone, and I've seen too many people annoyed at the "natural response" bots that pop in all the time on reddit.

If they're on their own instance, a whole instance can block that instance if they don't want bots, or block specific bots if they prefer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

mastodon already has botsin.space, depending on how well lemmy & masto interoperate (in theory they'll be fine because AP, but these kinda things tend to mess up in practice. lemmy still doesn't do authorized fetch afaik) hosting bots there & calling them from lemmy should work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the link, looks like they had the same idea.