auto-bot system

[Dannymh]

Hi All,

I regularly use reddit and one of the great (and sometimes annoying features) of reddit is the bot system. Being able to automate a bunch of tasks for the users and admins would be really handy.

Some of the great ones are say the "remind me" bot which will remind you to come and look at a post for updates, the video conversion ones are good too.

I think a great feature for xenforo would be a system in which these bots could be added with a few standard built in, the ability to say have users type a message of

/remind me - 2 days (set a reminder to look at the post in 2 days or whatever day you flag
/report - flag with moderators

and the ability to add others for your site. Basically they are just macros that do something or link into a service. For instance my site is sports related I would love to put in something like /stat-search -playername (to search and display recent stats on the player)

On top of this it would speed up moderation to throw in a bunch of macros that lets the moderators do things like

/merge-to thread_id
/Close-thread
/delete-thread

They can also be used to perform automated tasks, run via the cron system for instance that scans new posts for specific text and automatically applies whatever needs to be done.

For instance you could have one that looks for posts thaat say "I love Xenforo" and automatically reply with "Ahhh who doesn't?"

and so many more.

The possibilities are endless and if the system is written well enough opens up for a really good expansion of content and controls for the websites

 

[Dannymh]

I have been toying with some possibilities on this as well and looks like using the API system with off-site code could be a good way to for a bot to work, generally the reddit bots are real-time serverless code with node that runs against the Reddit API.

Whilst that would work here, it opens up too many wormholes and an internal macro or bot system may be better with its own pluggable system so that people can develop and share bots between xenforo sites

 

[Kirby]

While this sounds interesting on the surface, I don't think there would be much use for this - forums are not Reddit (or IRC ).
At least for our forums (we do have a about 80) I am pretty certain that almost nobody would use such features.

Therefore I think this should probably be done as an Add-on (ast least for now, things change over time and maybe in a few years the userbase behaves differently).

 

[Imgbi]

A great idea as the bot will be performing some important moderation like suggest above.
Putting posts on moderation if a suspected offensive, racist, or spam words are in the content.

Soft baning ability will also be a great idea.