Bitcoin Forum

It has pretty much gotten to the point where gribble will often be 30-40% of the lines in IRC.

Someone suggested, and I agreed, that gribble should start replying only via PM.  Nanotube disagreed, saying it would reduce usefulness.  I am inclined to agree with nanotube and ask the community for ideas on how to not reduce usefulness (at least as minimally as possible) while reducing the gribble spam.

The best change would be the easiest to implement.

Some things I've considered..

• Allow a voteban from the room if someone is abusing gribble.  If 5+ people say ,,squelch <nick> that person can't use gribble outside of PM for 30 minutes (or whatever)
• White list trusted users so they can pull the wiki, the guides and other factoids for the noobs as needed, and make everyone else use gribble in PM or a #bitcoin-bots
• Set a ratelimit so if gribble has spammed a certain amount he says 'its getting busy, lets move this to #bitcoin-bots'
• Remove the rainbow,morse,binary and other novel, but not really useful functions
• Have gribble tell users to authenticate via pm in his instructions (instead of ;;verify http://...  do /msg gribble ;;verify http://)
  

Maybe some combination of the above.. any other simpler brilliant ideas?  Is this even a problem?

As I heard someone suggest while I was on the channel, the ;;roulette command should ban instead of kick. Problem solved! :D But seriously, I think the vote ban is a good idea.

I like this one...

Also, I already use PM to communicate with the bot. Except for things like ratings/trades, I don't see the added value of throwing everything into a public channel.

I vote for voteban and updating documentation to suggest PMing gribble.  It wouldn't hurt to lose the less useful commands either.  I don't think we should restrict it too far.  If someone has a relevant order on the book, they should be able to at least ;;view it, unless they get sqelched.

1. Change the documentation to use "/msg gribble" for e.g. gpg eauth/everify. Lots of new IRC users don't know how to do it this way (nor did I until a few days ago).

2. Make some of gribble's responses more compact so that they're more likely to fit on one line.

I already PM gribble when I need something instead of calling him in main channel.

+1
I joined recently and at first followed the docs and didn't realise until later all the gribble commands were visible to everyone. It wasn't until further down in the current documentation it says you can do it for things like ratings you don't want public, it would be better to have all the examples use /msg from the start to get everyone into the habit.

Another option might be some client-side scripts and/or a new IRC client to be able to easily disregard gribble requests and responses. That would equally be good for join and quit messages which I don't find that useful on a channel with so many users.

I have been poking people to /msg gribble, to keep spam down.

Too many newbies though...  :)

Perhaps the best thing to do then is collectively encourage people to keep the spammy things to PM and not do it ourselves.

I also agree with changing the documentation.

i can fairly trivially change gribble to respond to all messages sent in -otc via PM.

yay or nay?

poll: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8342.0

i suggested in the other thread, i'll throw it here. set gribble up to respond to certain triggers differently, ;; as a in pm, and ! or @ or whatever as a in channel trigger. but that would rely on the bot type, i think its possible in eggdrop with some tweaking of the scripts, not sure if its possibly with supy though.

if its not possible, then i got nothing. the only thing i can see being even remotely annoying is the auths, any other request is usually important to more than one person in the channel so i agree gribble would lose a bit of usefulness and possibly even get spammed more, which wont spam the channel but will end up congensting and lagging gribble more (which is already getting to be a bit of an issue)

i also second any suggest to flat out disable certain commands, we dont need rainbow and azn and rot13 and roulette and the likes