Fabric

See some thoughts in this ML thread.

Extracted from it:

• Log channel to some persistent storage via a bot
• View it on the Web
  • irclogger is a nice Sinatra based Web front-end, though it doesn’t seem to have any actual logger bot involved — reads from a MySQL database. May be easy enough to reverse engineer its DB portion to figure out what a logger would need to write (and, of course, fork + hack to not use MySQL…)
  • Brian Rosner’s django logger – his about link is broken so it’s unclear if he’s got a logger bot or not. Ping him if interested.
  • TG logger page — down for me just now when I looked =/

Additional log-related features drawn up on the fly / based on using them elsewhere:

• Search
• Stats (useless but fun)
• Ability to link to specific lines or ranges/groups of lines (excellent for referencing specific discussions)

More thoughts from myself, mostly based on past experience as a user on other peoples' bots (without reviewing the above thread, so you should still reread it):

• Redmine ticket linking
• Redmine (and/or GitHub?) changeset/branch/file linking
• Redmine ticket search (could lead to flooding; how to find “the” ticket I'm thinking of? /msg user, have them pick one, then state that one in channel? just grab results[0]? be lazy and link to search results page?)
• Redmine ticket creation. Something like !ticket "subject" "description" which then spits back the resulting new ticket URL
• Sphinx docs searches, e.g. !docs interactivity makes the bot return either search query for (or if there’s only one hit, the resulting page for) that search term on the Sphinx docs
• Temporal intelligence, i.e. for a given response stimuli, don’t re-respond to it more than X times in Y period. For example, if I say “ticket #40” a few times in a row in the same 5 minute span, the bot should not parrot it each time.
  • Possibly be spatial instead of temporal, i.e. number of lines apart — that’s the real deal, I don’t want more than one reply per screen of conversation. While that height is different for everyone, find some sensible average like…12 or 20 or something…and go with it.

May be best to have one bot for dedicated logging, and use something premade (see e.g. phenny, phenny_osu) and have the other be a custom one responding to commands and/or stimuli.

(Note for searches: the bot’s name is Ghostwheel in-channel. Its source code is mirrored on GitHub.)

Best-of-breed Ruby libraries (based on quick research, haven’t investigated their docs myself yet)

• Autumn – pretty heavy, basically “Rails for IRC” — would rather not.
• Cinch – looks pretty featureful while still easy to use/hack
• Isaac — great looking API but few docs
• RBot — bunch of features I don’t care for, few docs, set up to be a general bot you don’t code but config on the fly — no thanks.

Result: try Isaac first, go to Cinch if Isaac proves difficult to understand.

Also, this RBot plugin handles Redmine integration. Probably not a good enough reason to use RBot but good for ideas/cribbing.

(Looked for Python bot libs too but didn’t find any that I liked.)