We searched Medline, Embase and Cochrane for the phrase bots are not funny



  • @accalia said:

    While i respect your right to be annoyed and angry at the bot activity I will not be turning off the bots simply because you, and i am using the term loosely here, asked me to.

    Then turn them off because they ruin threads. Turn them off because they subvert the entire fucking point of having a discussion in the first place. Turn them off because they're repetitive and unfunny. There's a billion reasons to turn them off other than "Blakeyrat asked me to".

    @accalia said:

    No one with a position of authority, or frankly respect, has asked me to terminate the bots

    I don't give a shit. You derailing topics like the Amazon Lambda one is wrong. You killed it, stone-dead. You know it's wrong.

    The topic is the big-ass turd lying on the expensive rug, and I'm the one forcing your face down in it. Take a big whiff. Even a dog knows it's wrong.

    The old forums never needed moderators, because it wasn't full of sociopaths who were just unapologic assholes. Nobody on the old forums conspired to send me a million spam messages (something which is literally illegal where I live, BTW) because they disagreed with something I typed. Nobody on the old forums wrote idiotic bots to derail conversations because it was "fun". The only moderation needed was deleting spam, and even that was only really obvious spam.

    You know why? Because on the old forum, people apparently had the power of human empathy-- that ability to know when they were being a dick to someone, and to realize, "hey, maybe I shouldn't be a dick to someone!"

    And before you assholes all call me a hypocrite, remember: sticks and stones.

    @accalia said:

    If you wish to remove the bots from the forum I encourage you to work with those in a position of authority to get them to issue an edict that removes the bots from use.

    I don't think the moderators should have to type a long post saying, "hey, BTW? Keep the bot bullshit that only a couple people like in the topic specifically created for the bot bullshit that only a couple people like so everybody else can ignore it." I think that's basic fucking common sense.

    I think you think that too, because I'm not willing to believe you're either that stupid or that sociopathic to not think that. Same goes to @Zecc.

    You guys aren't assholes, you're just acting like assholes. I don't know why, but I'm hoping that by holding your nose really close to that big turd sitting right there in the middle of that expensive rug, maybe you'll come to some realization.

    @accalia said:

    Alternatively if you have a constructive idea on how the bots can be made less annoying or more useful, I welcome and encourage you to present them to me, either in public or via PM.

    I gave you one: turn them off. Yes, that is constructive. Turn them off. All of them. Right now. Delete the code. Delete the GitHub repo. That would make this forum immeasurably better, and it only takes a few minutes.

    @accalia said:

    Please note however that abusive language or profanity will not help your case at all, in fact it will severely compromise the point you are attempting to make.

    Oh fuckity fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck! Someone who doesn't like... gasp... CURSE WORDS?! Fucking shit cunt!

    Why the fuck are you even here then?



  • Sounds like a perfect area for compromise. Turn off the bots (Something blakeyrat doesn't like) in return for ceasing to use curse words (something accalia doesn't like).

    Presto! No one is happy!



  • I don't even give a shit if the bots are turned off, as long as I don't see them. We already have a solution on this forum for that: a topic specifically for using bots. The problem is assholes not using it, because they're assholes.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    And before you assholes all call me a hypocrite, remember: sticks and stones.



  • Yeah and another thing about this fucking new forum from hell: when did posting XKCD become acceptable? Fuck that bullshit.

    If you feel bad because of what some random idiot on the internet who you don't even know says about you, you're a moron. I don't give a shit what any of you think, if you give a shit about what I think, that's your problem, not mine.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    . The problem is assholes not using it, because they're assholes.

    Yeah, perhaps you might consider being less of an asshole yourself.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    I don't give a shit what any of you think

    Well, that seems like plenty of motivation to be nice to you!



  • Sticks and stones.

    There's actions, and there's words. I use aggressive words that (in theory I suppose) could "hurt" really milquetoast people who aren't in on the joke. But it's just words.

    Sending thousands of spam messages, ruining topics, etc. Those are actions. Actions cause real harm.

    This all is filed under: "I can't believe I had to actually explain this". Isn't this shit obvious?



  • Well, my first inclination was to ask what zoidberg thinks about all this, but I restrained myself. I do actually agree with you on people taking the internet far too seriously, but clearly you do as well.

    Linking relevant images is something that happens on the internet, though. You may not like it, but it's not even your kind of abuse.


  • FoxDev

    </levity>

    @blakeyrat said:

    You derailing topics like the Amazon Lambda one is wrong. You killed it, stone-dead. You know it's wrong.

    Excuse me? I Derailed the Amazon thread? I made one comment about running sockbot via the lambda service and then went to sleep for the night. I woke up to find that @Zecc and several others had caught onto the bot thing and were using SockBot to spam your topic.

    Not my doing. Although I suppose I must take some responsibility as the creator and operator of SockBot.

    I did reply when the concept of abusing my bots for DOS attack purposes came up, and while I possibly should have split thread at that point I did not and the thread was already well off topic.

    I also replied to someone's query about the dice roll mechanics, again i possibly should have split topic, but that is not a common thing here and the topic was also well off topic anyway. After that i wandered off to do my day job.

    Later I stepped back into the fray when you called me out on having the bots saying that they needed to be turned off. I said No, rather politely i thought given the rather glaring lack of politeness you used. The word "Fuck" is not and never will be polite, there's a reason that I tend to [censor] or use humorous replacements. (like Fracking)

    You then proceeded to repeat your rant verbatim about my bots needing to be killed. I repeated my answer and expanded upon it. The answer, by the way, is still No.

    @blakeyrat said:

    I think you think that too, because I'm not willing to believe you're either that stupid or that sociopathic to not think that.

    You're right. I don't like it when my bots are abused. That's why i'm still very upset that i had to change them so that they ignore TL0 and rate limit TL1 users interactions. I should not have had to do that.

    You will also notice that I summoned Sockbot to that thread exactly twice. Both times i was talking about the bot and @mentioned the bot in exactly the same way that i would talk about @pjh and mention him (sorry for using you as an example ther PJH)

    To date you are the only person that has an issue with the bots and has vocalized it to me, and while i'm sad that you do not like them the rest of the community is embracing their use.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Nobody on the old forums conspired to send me a million spam messages (something which is literally illegal where I live, BTW)

    It's illegal here too, however unless West coast US has different laws than East coast the notification emails from Discourse don't count as spam as they were opted into by your signing up. You can change your email preferences if you want but they are rather course grained. Sorry about that.

    I have also opened a feature request over on meta.d that is aimed at reducing notification spam from users that you dislike. This has (surprisingly) been received well by the discodevs and i am hopeful that the functionality is added soon.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Turn them off. All of them. Right now. Delete the code. Delete the GitHub repo.

    No. Not on your word alone.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Someone who doesn't like... gasp... CURSE WORDS?!

    No, I don't. I do, however respect your right to use them. Note that I did not say that you could not use the swear words you used there, only that they would undermine your argument in my eyes.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Why the fuck are you even here then?

    Because i'm having fun interacting with this community and I enjoy it here. And from what I can see most of the community actually likes having me here.

    You do not appear to have fun interacting with this community and by all appearances do not have fun here.

    Why then are you here? Please, I'm genuinely interested to know.


    In other, more pleasant to you, news I am temporarily suspending my work on AdminBot for @PJH (who requested that I do that work) and looking into implementing a feature for my bots such that they can ignore threads based on who the OP of the thread is.

    If such a thing is feasible i will implement it without delay and seed the list of users to ignore with your name and with that of @PaulaBean. That should effectively ban the bots from the Article category as well as any thread that you create.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Isn't this shit obvious?

    Of course it is. Didn't everyone stop @trolling you? I know I did.

    Strangely enough, people don't go out of there way to be nice to, or do nice things for, assholes. I realize your shoulder aliens prevent you from acting on that information but I am going to provide it anyway.

    The whole schtick was funny a few years ago. At this point it's just tedious, but if feces-flinging is your thing, go ahead and keep it up.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I suspect there are people posting on this forum.

    Shortly after the bots became a thing, they were everywhere. Then the bot category was created and people were told to try to keep the bots there. It was pretty successful, but slowly, people started calling them in other places. I guess we'll start again with that process.



  • @accalia said:

    I did reply when the concept of abusing my bots for DOS attack purposes came up, and while I possibly should have split thread at that point I did not and the thread was already well off topic.

    I was doing wrong stuff but... but OTHER PEOPLE WERE TOO that's my excuse I'm 4 years old!!!

    @accalia said:

    The word "Fuck" is not and never will be polite,

    That's what makes it funny.

    @accalia said:

    You're right. I don't like it when my bots are abused.

    Obviously you do, or you'd fix the situation.

    @accalia said:

    That's why i'm still very upset that i had to change them so that they ignore TL0 and rate limit TL1 users interactions. I should not have had to do that.

    You should not have made them in the first place.

    @accalia said:

    To date you are the only person that has an issue with the bots and has vocalized it to me, and while i'm sad that you do not like them the rest of the community is embracing their use.

    Yeah well a single howler monkey is just as annoying as a whole troop of them.

    @accalia said:

    You can change your email preferences if you want but they are rather course grained. Sorry about that.

    Wait, what? Do you work for Discourse? WTF! When did that happen? I should have had you in my "this person is an idiot" file.

    @accalia said:

    Why then are you here? Please, I'm genuinely interested to know.

    I can't quit now for any reason because everybody would be like, "Blakeyrat rage quit again LOLOLOLOL let's do a pool on what he gets back LOLOLOLOLOL!" I have my dignity, damn it.

    @FrostCat said:

    Of course it is. Didn't everyone stop @trolling you?

    Only after I had to talk to the moderators about it, which is fucking unacceptable.

    @FrostCat said:

    Strangely enough, people don't go out of there way to be nice to, or do nice things for, assholes.

    But they go out of their way to send spam messages? What kind of logic is that? "I won't expend extra effort to be nice to this person, but I will expend lots of effort to harass them!" Is that like 4chan thinking? WTF.

    @FrostCat said:

    The whole schtick was funny a few years ago.

    No it wasn't.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    That's what makes it funny.

    it's not funny.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Obviously you do, or you'd fix the situation.

    I'm sorry that your preferred fix is not acceptable to me. I'm not turning the bots off, but I will work to make them better and less annoying.

    That's why i opened the feature request on meta.d to allow you to mute notifications from the bots, that's also why i'm stopping work on a frankly far more interesting project to make changes to the bots so that it is harder to use them to troll you.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Wait, what? Do you work for Discourse? WTF! When did that happen? I should have had you in my "this person is an idiot" file.

    go ahead and put me in that file. I'll be glad to have the company of everyone else you've put there.

    I don't work for them, i haven't even issued a single PR to that project. but that doesn't stop me from being empathetic and polite.

    @blakeyrat said:

    I can't quit now for any reason because everybody would be like, "Blakeyrat rage quit again LOLOLOLOL let's do a pool on what he gets back LOLOLOLOLOL!" I have my dignity, damn it.

    that's an interesting reason for staying.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @accalia said:

    I'll be glad to have the company of everyone else you've put there.

    👋


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @blakeyrat said:

    You killed it, stone-dead

    Oh, I guess I'll stop having an interesting conversation with you in it then.

    Threads go off topic all the time. We cope.



  • It's almost as if I typed that at a different time! And things have changed since then! But no, no that's surely not possible.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    My point was the second and third sentences, not the first. That's hardly the first thread to ever go off the rails.



  • I have zero reason to believe that topic would ever have become interesting again, had the mods not moved all the bullshit bot posts elsewhere. There were like 50 of them.



  • Maybe @accalia should just include a disclaimer in all the bots' posts that reads: "If you want to discuss this bot, go to [thread name here]".

    It's a conversation issue, not a bot issue.



  • Doesn't this make you feel like living in the "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" universe? Blakeyrat would have a great time being a droid hunter.



  • I respect your opinion, but I disagree with it.

    The bots are more entertaining than most of the posters here.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @chubertdev said:

    The bots are more entertaining than most of the posters here.

    In moderation they can be good. A zoidberg / mottbott bon mot can be just what the Dr ordered. But a wall of dice rolls is interesting to the person who asked and maybe the author of the bot.



  • Shall I summon SummonBot here?


  • FoxDev

    @aliceif said:

    Maybe @accalia should just include a disclaimer in all the bots' posts that reads: "If you want to discuss this bot, go to [thread name here]".

    It's a conversation issue, not a bot issue.

    there's already a disclaimer in the profiles of my bots, I see no problem with adding a disclaimer to the posts... care to take a stab on what the general disclaimer should be? (and what thread i should use to direct them to)

    I agree it's a conversation issue, also a respect issue. the bots are doing nothing that a human couldn't.

    @boomzilla said:

    But a wall of dice rolls is interesting to the person who asked and maybe the author of the bot.

    i'm seriously considering making that feature a PM only one. it was written to fracilitate a play by post RP that @tarunik is running via PM. other than testing there's no real need for it to reply to @mention summons.

    @chubertdev said:

    Shall I summon SummonBot here?

    No



  • My bots are crashed out again, so summon him all you want, he won't respond.



  • But if he became un-crashed, would the pending notification result in a necro splurge?



  • No. They now start up in Lurk Mode which means they only respond to PMs until someone commands them out of Lurk Mode. They will still consume public notifications, but won't respond.



  • You sound a bit irritable, blakeyrat! Maybe you should go see a doctor... Let's ask @zoidberg for his opinion!

    In all seriousness, people on here tend to troll a lot more than on other forums. I'm one of them, I normally never troll, but here it's sometimes fun to do. And heck, everybody here does it, or has personalities that come over as trolling. And those bots are fun to troll with once in a while.
    (I don't think I did anything wrong in particular in that thread, I simply joined the mass with one post, I merely offended some people with the DDoS comment)

    I agree the bots are perhaps overused a bit. But they can be tremendously fun if not used too often. I don't know, maybe a per-user limit (eg 1 bot per day) or something could be a fair compromise? I don't know, but there's a lot of room between full-on and off.

    Edit: Very insightful, zoidberg!



  • This post is deleted!

  • FoxDev

    Don't use my bots to tick blakey off.

    not cool.



  • But @Zoidberg really makes the thread more bearable



  • This post is deleted!

  • FoxDev

    stop.

    now.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Evo said:

    You sound a bit irritable, blakeyrat! Maybe you should go see a doctor... Let's ask zoidberg for his opinion!

    Oh no you didn't.

    Edit: mention removed just in case.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Evo said:

    In all seriousness, people on here tend to troll a lot more than on other forums. I'm one of them, I normally never troll, but here it's sometimes fun to do. And heck, everybody here does it, or has personalities that come over as trolling.

    Some guy once said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    It helps to remember everybody here is a troll.


  • FoxDev

    i just put him to sleep for the next two hours.



  • What? I'll just have to fork sockbot and make a Evil Zoidberg.


  • FoxDev

    not like i san stop you....

    NOTA BENE: Edited the title back to what Blakey originally used.



  • @accalia said:

    NOTA BENE: Edited the title back to what Blakey originally used.

    Some of us have work filters.


  • FoxDev

    then pick a title to edit to that isn't poking fun maybe?

    spoonerisms aren't funny



  • @accalia said:

    then pick a title to edit to that isn't poking fun maybe?

    spoonerisms aren't funny

    Says you.



  • @delfinom said:

    What? I'll just have to fork sockbot and make a Evil Zoidberg.

    I get it, you agree with blakeyrat and try to get @accalia to get so annoyed with the bots he will kill them himself, right?

    (Note, I was just kidding with my zoidberg summon, no offence intended @accalia and @blakeyrat)


  • FoxDev

    @Evo said:

    he

    He? try again.

    Zoidberg will be back in a little less than 2 hours. i felt we all needed a cooling off period.


  • Java Dev

    Can we please agree to keep the 'fun' out of meta? You may agree with blakey, you may disagree with blakey, you may want to poke fun at blakey, but if someone starts a discussion like this in meta let's keep it serious. And no bots.


  • FoxDev

    also looking into blocking bots from categories. not sure how feasible that will be.



  • I briefly looked into it but couldn't find an easy way to get the category ID of a notification. The easier way would be to use the forum's built-in category security and groups to block them.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    For the dicebot, have you considered keying off a html comment in the OP to make it opt-in per thread?


  • FoxDev

    hmm interesting idea; however, out of respect for blakeyrat's thread shall we move that discussion here?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    This is an interesting idea, but I don't think my wife will let me buy a fuck bot.


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