TD Bot

[Tom]

From my limited experience with other leagues it seems the biggest limitation is getting Human TDs to run the Ts

To that end I wrote a bot to maintain a tourney schedule and it has helped dramatically.

The TourneyBot does a number of needed features and I am considering writing a bot that interacts with players and tourneybot to help increase the number of tourney's that can be played.

The second part of tourneys is a rating/ranking system.

The TD Bot could send results via email or update stats on some web pages.

I would not be porting my existing bot here because each environment is different; but starting from scratch.

What do I think this bot could do?

1) Create T's on a predefined schedule
2) SHOUT T's existence and starting time (unless tourneybot does enough in that area)
3) Work with Tourney Bot to see match completion
4) Handle Clocks maybe with user interaction as needed
5) advance players when proper (opponent times out)
etc

It would need a subscribe command (like tbot) so as to keep lobby clutter free

Some of these things may be done well enough by TourneyBot.

There may also be other things that might be need to run automatic tourneys

If anyone want to see what my existing bot does let me know and I'll let you know where she runs.
(she runs 24x7 and has been running for over 1 1/2 years.)

Tom

[toonarmy]

would your bot be a bitbot or a botbit??? sorry i dont know what i am talking about...sounds like a good ideal to me but what would i know i thought it was a good idea to eat yellow snow!!

[socksey]

I'd like to see what your bot does, but #3 is done quite nicely by Tourneybot already.     I'll be away for another day or so, so email me here with info.

Thanks!

socksey

[Tom]

Good one more thing off my list...

So TD BOT needs to

Create T's
Handle Clocks (advancing players when needed)
Publish tourney results

At this point the 'Publish Results' can stay pretty open ended

The big question if I create this bot and it runs a few T's a day would they be played?
Do Fibsters like tourneys? (Maybe that is not a question for a BOT forum LOL)

tom

[socksey]

I think it is important that the auto tourneys do not coincide with the scheduled tourneys that we now have.  Other than that, I see no problem with having the tourneys.

socksey



If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man. -Mark Twain

[Tom]

I agree don't want too many T's going on at once!

I was thinking of a static schedule defined by TD type people.

Tom

[Tomawaky]

For Bago session it could be useful
Always planned at the same time and If I can receive result in a specific format, it would be great 

[Tom]

Yes this is exactly one of the things I want to do.

We can figure out what to put in the email and where to go.

I am planning to have a tourney schedule file that could have any reasonable parameters some that come to mind:

Day-of-Week
Time
Nickname (maybe single word no spaces or specials)
Name (free form name)
format
max-rounds
etc - anything else that TourneyBot can use
td-email place to email log of tourney and results (maybe 2 emails, one a detailed log of clocks etc, second final standings)
report url - maybe a way to post results to a league specific website

I am sure other things will become obvious as we get things working

Tom

[webrunner]

You can even make it post the results here

[socksey]

Yes!   

socksey



The people you care most about in life are taken from you too soon. All the less important ones just never go away, and the real pains in the ass are permanent.  - unknown

[Gusssss]

Yes we need more tourneys ! 

[Tom]

Consider it done.

[webrunner]

If you need help you know where to find me

[Tom]

Yes I am now to the point of figuring out what order to implement which features...

tdbot can login, parse and maintain a copy of the user list (needed for clocks) and
process commands (tbd) via TELL - only have 'help' implemented

I guess the next step would be to create a tourney based upon a predefined schedule.
(like once a day for now)

Then parse tourneybot replied to monitor matches and watch for players going offline or idle
(for clocks)

since the replies are in many tells it will be interesting to collect it all...

i knew it was not going to be *real* easy

tom

[MadMatt]

Hi, the features you're interested in have always been planned for TourneyBot. In particular, the automatic tourney thing was something I always wanted to do. It never happened simply because I never got to that point before moving on to other things and because most of the TourneyBot's advanced features are under-utilized anyway, so it did not seem worth the effort to implement something like that.

Reporting to web pages and such has also been extensively discussed in the tourney director's forum. You have to ask webrunner where to find that, I'm not sure if it still exists and is accessible to the public. Since then, a couple of technologies have matured that could make reporting quite quite easy to do, such as RSS.

If you wish to develop these enhancements as add-ons to TourneyBot rather than your own bot, the source code to TourneyBot is available on the home page at http://www.fibsboard.com/tourneybot. It is licensed under Public Domain, so you can use it in any way you want. If the changes are implemented well enough, I'll merge them into the "official" TourneyBot code release.

Incidentally, webrunner, I noticed that some pages of the TourneyBot web page are missing (such as the command reference). I imagine something went wrong with the move to new server/software? I can't look into it myself since I don't remember my username/password to log into the account anymore.

[Tom]

I considered adding code to tourneybot, but I know C 1000% better (maybe 10000000%) than Ruby
so the chances of any Ruby code I write being good enough for anything official (not to mention stable)
would be pretty slim.

Oh yes I'm using C not C++

By profession I am an embedded programmer (in C)

We'll see how it goes and if we find a good reason to put me though the pain of learning a new langauge
they I may consider it...

(and don't tell me "It will be good for you" or I'll have to slap you around!)

[MadMatt]

I considered adding code to tourneybot, but I know C 1000% better (maybe 10000000%) than Ruby
so the chances of any Ruby code I write being good enough for anything official (not to mention stable)
would be pretty slim.

For me, learning new things is half the fun of free for-your-soul projects like this one. Part of the reason I wrote TourneyBot was that I thought Ruby looked cool and maybe I should give it a try.

That said, I absolutely support any kind of enhancements to the FIBS tourney community via additional bots. I don't have much time, but let me know if you need any help - I'll answer any questions about TourneyBot and the protocols when I have the time.

[Tomawaky]

  funny !
I created FibsLeaGammon because I wondering how was working php 

[Tom]

Yeah I know

I wrote The ROSE X.25 Packet Switch to learn C (and worked on it for 10 years)
http://www.tapr.org/pub_cnc08.html

I put 2-3 years into osCommerce.com when I wanted to learn PHP

Maybe I'm just getting old LOL (been doing this stuff for 30 years...)

[webrunner]

Hi Matt, great to "see" you here again

Take a look here: http://tourneybot.fibsboard.com/ 

If you want a copy of the website so you can edit it, let me know by PM