Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
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- Open-ended question
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Because none of us ever read the article anyway... autotldr bot.
RemindMe bot is awesome
Beat me to it. Came here to say exactly this.
Video/image download bot would be super useful.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically.
You missed the bleep-bloop!
A bot that would find the equivalent to a subreddit on lemmy, or correct users if they link a community incorrectly.
Definitely this. Was thinking about making a bit myself to do this as the whole direct link thing is such a pain but I donβt have any experience in making bots so Iβd be even happier if someone else manages to make one!
Something that automatically converts https://beehaw.org/c/support to [support](/c/support) so they are useable across instances.___
I've always found the ones that give a Wikipedia summary useful
Also the one that turned Wikipedia mobile links into desktop ones.
A repost detecting bot might be helpful
there was one on reddit called reportsleuthbot But isn't it a little hard to make? It might be too complex for learning python...
fair point
Since no one mentioned it,
Stabbot - the video stabilising bot to fix videos that the uploader didn't bother with.
Songfinder bot seems handy to prevent earworms.
Plus a lot of the other ones mentioned. Just helpful bots with a distinct purpose that come in when asked to save time or educate.
A bot that listens to and tallys "goodbott" and "bad bot" comments
One major bot that is fediverse specific. A community syncing bot. So if two communities from different instances want to, they could have a bot that crossposts everything between each other and delete one deleted between each other. A more advanced feature to have is to have it only do certain tags, so for example [email protected] with a help/question and fedora tags could be auto posted to [email protected], and [email protected] .
On that note, I'd like to see something like "crossposts" supported.
Remindme! in 10 years
I'm sure something like AutoMod would eventually become useful for community moderators.
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.
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.
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.
GNU units to the rescue! https://www.gnu.org/software/units/
...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.
For some LoTR flavoring, Gandalf bot is always welcome.
RemindMe was super useful
Amputatorbot!!
I really hope it won't be needed, but we should probably have an nwordcount bot ready to go, just in case
There's no bots I'm really missing hard right now, but it's worth recalling that bots are such a popular approach on Reddit specifically because the community has no way to improve reddit directly. If you want to add a feature to reddit, the ONLY way you can do it is to try to parse the text in a post/comment and the have the bot post it's own output as a comment or whatever.
With Lemmy, the code is open source and you can improve it directly. So before writing a bot to hammer the apis of an instance reading every post/comment made to a community, it's worth asking oneself if Lemmy could be improved to natively do the thing without needing a bot. Like for remind-me, what if Lemmy had a native remind-me button that direct-messaged you with a link to a post after some configurable delay. Easier to use, more efficient, no bot needed.
Now, this might be more work than writing a bot. And a bot can be a useful way to prototype some feature. It also means learning rust and JavaScript rather than python, and it means cooperating with Lemmy devs who might have concerns about performance at-scale, maintainability, or user-experience. These concerns will likely make the result better though. It's fine to do stuff via bots, but consider the possibility that directly contributing to improve Lemmy would be a better result that isn't possible in the Reddit ecosystem.
None, honestly.
Same. Bots are spam.
This isn't necessarily a bot in and of itself...but, could function as one. It would be really cool if bots could reshare content from other fediverse sources into a group automatically, but preserve attribution to the original posters.
Would be really handy for, say, automatically sharing PeerTube videos to a community dedicated to watching them.
I'd love to see some of the bots you'd see on sports subreddits, things like a Match Thread updating with live scores, substitutions etc, without a mod having to do all that work themselves.
I made a couple of bots that could give you some ideas:
https://github.com/SleeplessOne1917/lemmy-ocr-bot
Lemmygrad has a bot which detects youtube, twitter and reddit links in your post and offers links to open source front ends like invidious, nitter and libreddit. It'd be nice if we had one of those.
I saw someone attempt to invoke a !remindme bot in some other thread. I don't know if that's actually something that exists already, but that would probably be useful for people who use it.