dbot/README.md

Depressionbot IRC Bot

Introduction

Depressionbot is an IRC bot which aims to be the fanciest IRC bot around - On the general standard of software fanciness, dbot is rated as being ‘75% the same as bathing in fine, fine grape juice.’

Please note that this documentation is not complete and is a work in progress, given I started it rather a long time after I began development of the project. Please don’t judge me too harshly for this as I am, in fact, mildly allergic to writing documentation.

Requirements:

• Node JS
• JSBot, a Javascript library which handles the IRC protocol.
• Various modules have their own requirements also.

JSBot

JSBot can be imported by running the following commands in the cloned repository:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Modules:

Command

This handles the command execution logic for DBot.

1. Does the input match a command key in dbot.commands ?
2. Is there a quote category which matches the first part of the input (~category)?
3. Is there a command name similar to to the first part of the input (~name) in dbot.commands?

This is the only module which is force loaded, even if it’s not in the configuration.

Quotes

This is the original reason that DBot was created, stores and displays quotes.

Commands:

• ~q category - Display a random quote from a given category.
• ~qadd category=newquote - Add a new quote to the database.
• ~qstats - Show a list of the biggest quote categories.
• ~qsearch category needle - Search for a quote in a given category.
• ~rmlast [category] - Remove the last quote added to a given category, or the last quote added.
• ~rm category quote - Remove a given quote from the given category.
• ~qcount category - Show the number of quotes stored in the given category.
• ~rq - Show a random quote from a random category.
• ~d - Show a quote from the category which matches the bot’s name.
• ~link category - Create a link to the page on the web interface which displays the given category’s quotes.
• ~qprune - Delete empty quote categories.

Unfortunately, this module is fairly highly coupled with certain other areas of the program. I am working on this, but note, for example, that one can still access quotes with the ~category syntax even if the quotes module isn’t loaded.

Admin

Various administration functionality such as banning users, hot-reloading the code and ordering him to talk. Note that commands added here are handled with their own listener, rather than being part of the command logic which is handled by the Command module. Functionality in this module can be slightly unsafe as not much error checking on the input is performed.

TODO: Add summaries for each command in this module.

Spelling

Will attempt to correct a users’ spelling by using the levenshtein distance algorithm. One corrects the spelling of their previous message by simply posting a message with their correction and an asterisk:

> user: I am a tutrle.
> user: *turtle
user meant: I am a turtle.

The regular expression for this module also accepts two asterisks at the beginning of the correction, or at the end; it also accepts several words as the correction and deals with these fairly intelligently. Users may also attempt to correct another users like so:

> userone: I am a tutrle.
> usertwo: userone: *turtle
> usertwo thinks userone meant: I am a turtle.

JS

This module provides two commands which allow the execution of Javascript code. For regular users, there is the ~js command, which is completely sandboxed, but can still be used for calculation and the like.

> ~js Array(16).join('wat'-1) + " Batman!";
'NaNNaNNaNNaNNaNNaNNaNNaNNaNNaNNaNNaNNaNNaNNaN Batman!'

This feature is fairly safe as the user doesn’t have access to anything dangerous, and is safe from infinite loops or locking DBot up because the code which is run is killed if it does not finish within a short amount of time.

For administrators, the incredibly useful ~ajs command is also available. The input for this command is simply ‘eval’-ed and therefore has full access to DBot’s memory. Of course, this is incredibly unsafe, but I find it rather fun; remember to only give extremely trusted friends administrator access to DBot, as there’s nothing to stop them wiping the database or something similar - if you’re worried about that kind of thing, do not load this module.

However, it’s useful for many things, such as administrative activity for which there isn’t a command in the admin module. For example, you could hot-add a new administrator like this:

> ~ajs dbot.admin.push('batman');
2

You can also use this for debugging, or even adding new commands while DBot is running.