'Report Incoming' feature - IRC addition

[Cochese]

I'm probably not the only one who thinks this idea would be vastly more useful if it reported incomings into a designated IRC channel, or to/through a designated IRC bot.

The feature we have this round would have been nice about 20 rounds ago, but is essentially obsolete now


Perhaps a field on the 'Preferences' page where you can specify an IRC channel or bot which will recieve the incomming report, rather than an alliance page--which probably doesn't get used as much as it could, or should.

[Ultimate Newbie]

Originally Posted by Cochese

Perhaps a field on the 'Preferences' page where you can specify an IRC channel or bot which will recieve the incomming report, rather than an alliance page--which probably doesn't get used as much as it could, or should.

I know little (ie, nothing) about coding, but how are you meant to move from the webpage/IRC barrier? In the past, it involved lemmings copy&pasting from the galaxy page to a specific IRC channel. How would you hard-code that?

Further, why not just adapt the IRC systems to handle the reports* from the Alliance defence page - that way, officers and above in an alliance can copy & paste those reports to the IRC bot directly, and do it en masse, which should be easier than the current practice of piecemeal reporting that used to go on.

So, I find myself in general agreement, but why make it too easy?




*Formatting this to look exactly like the Galaxy status page would mean that no additional coding would be required for most IRC systems.

[Cochese]

I'm sure I know even less than you about the technical barriers.

To me, it's all just "stuff on the internet"...what could possibly be so difficult about moving information from one medium (web page) to another (IRC)?

Ignorance is bliss I suppose. Just a random thought that crossed my mind while sitting here sipping rum, actually thinking about PA for once.

[Mzyxptlk]

Moving data from a website to an IRC channel is a little tricky, but it's definitely doable. In the end, it's all packets of 0s and 1s on the internet. You'll basically end up with a helper application that recieves a http response and sends an IRC message.

[Veedeejem!]

I'm not sure how it can be done either, but almost all the tech i've ever seen used in alliances had irc bots & webby connected to eachother so it's definetly possible.

[wakey]

Its not that hard to do, however i'm not too sure how viable it actually is from an IRC server pov.

You could possibly be looking at hundreds of people clicking the button to report an incoming within a few moments of the tick happening. This could either flood the bot off the network or atleast cause a reporting lag. If that reporting lag gets too big you could see alliances having incoming reported to them at the start of a tick but them not receiving the report till much later in the tick.

You could maybe have it so that each alliance has their own reporting bot but the overheads for PA to run enough bots for all alliances could be pretty immense

[GReaper]

This is why the game could do with some super basic API so that people could use the data in a way which they want it instead of being forced to copy and paste pages or get scripts to scrape the most awful HTML known to man. Why this has continued for so long I don't know.

Certain alliances like to use IRC, others tend to use their alliances website. It would be nice to offer something neutral for players and alliances to use so they can get the data and use it in whichever way they want.

[Mzyxptlk]

Originally Posted by wakey

Its not that hard to do, however i'm not too sure how viable it actually is from an IRC server pov.

You could possibly be looking at hundreds of people clicking the button to report an incoming within a few moments of the tick happening. This could either flood the bot off the network or atleast cause a reporting lag. If that reporting lag gets too big you could see alliances having incoming reported to them at the start of a tick but them not receiving the report till much later in the tick.

You could maybe have it so that each alliance has their own reporting bot but the overheads for PA to run enough bots for all alliances could be pretty immense

P does fine, I see no reason why another bot shouldn't. The server'll be fine. On the other hand, that would require some integration between Netgamers and Planetarion (ie, Jolt), and I'm not sure if that's got a chance of succeeding.

[LordNieminen]

hmmph.. isn't the goal of the game to make people be up some time of the night to send def.. instead sleeping and just letting their gal mates to report inc's.

I gues it's good for normal members but seriously the communities what sustain this game are alliance based mainly.. make too much easy-mode stuff and you get quite dead alliances outside euro prime timezone with just full of def call notices.

Thou personally this would just mean a lot of more roids for me, as def suffers.. but my def would suffer aswell, thou never trust that your alliance can cover you.. as that's stupid anyways.

as a sidenote.. everyone uses def chan's these days and we'r pretty much in that spot of game already.. so dunno if there's real argument against a merger of these features.

[Influence]

an XML output of the current page would be sufficient for techies to produce easy scripts that automatically update every once in a while.

[Mzyxptlk]

That (probably?) takes away the need for someone to be online to report the incomings though, which is something we don't want, I think we all agree on.