Banbot

The spring lobby server has global server wide bans and a bot called Chanserv which provides moderation controls to channel operators at a channel level. Sadly channel bans were not one of those features.

In the past I had put everything into cookiebot and since cookiebot was at best an experiment, it became very messy. The new approach would be to create a bot for every function that was required, and release the bots to the community to use in their own channels. The new bots would be smaller, easier to understand and maintain. The first such ‘small bot’ was banbot.

Banbot maintained a single list of users which where not allowed in the same channel. When a user entered the channel that banbot is who was flagged as banned, banbot would send a !kick command to Chanserv via private message and the user would be booted from the channel almost as soon as they joined. This required that channel operators gave Banbot operator status

Banbot became rather successful, as channel operators now had a tool for getting rid of spammers who rejoined that didn’t involve locking their channels with passwords, preventing people who didn’t have the password from joining. Operator status was given to the instance running the account []Banbot in ~20 channels. Banbot was released on my main website as a download, and many users showed an interest, however because many didnt have the means to host a bot or the will to download and run the bot, they granted []Banbot operator status and had it join there channel.

Since []Banbot was designed to sit in a single channel and not multiple channels, chaos ensued. The single list policy of banbot became the main criticism, and the introduction of []Banbot to the #k channel exposed the fundamental flaws of ignoring the one instance per channel rule. A particularly power mad user Tsuyosa recognized the issue and realized if a user was banned in her channel, they were also banned in all 20 other channels. Channel operators were horrified to find banbot booting them out of their own channels on login and rather than demanded action to which Tsuyosas operator privileges on []Banbot were removed, but not before she attempted to exploit the same flaw in slurbot which operated under the same 1 bot per channel design, and rather unsuccessfully cookiebot.

At this point confidence in the use of []Banbot floundered despite a stable code base. Inspired by Cookiebots success a new breed of community members had arrived and started coding their own bots which started to take over the role of Banbot. These were trusted more because the people running them tended to be the people who built them. Eventually the fad for ban bots ended and development of Banbot shifted away towards Lobby client development and AI development.

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