VoteBot 9000 - Hidden Commands

I've heard some grumbling about how VoteBot doesn't accept commands that are hidden by colored text or small font, so I'm going to hold a vote for a couple days to see what the community as a whole thinks about the issue. If two things end up being really close, I'll hold another quick poll to see which of the two people like most.

As far as I can see, this issue has five options here:
1. The bot accepts all commands, so long as they contain the bold tag and are not in a quote.
This is the most broad option. It would allow every bot command to be completely hidden if the poster chose to hide it, but it would also allow malicious players to do things like vote or join in a way that isn't easily seen except through the bot. So if I had a power outage here or the bot went down for some reason, people might not notice the malicious action until the bot came up again.

2. Implement option one, but only allow the host to use it.
This would ensure player actions like voting and joining are clear in the thread, but it would also allow the host to use hidden tags

3. Include a special syntax for commands that should be hidden.
This would allow other players who view the thread before the bot posts to see the commands. Once the bot views the command, it edits the post to make the command invisible. I'm thinking something like [[command]] could be used to designate a command as something that should be hidden once the bot reads it.

4. Implement option three, but only allow the host to use it.
This would still ensure player actions like voting and joining are clear in the thread, but it would also allow the host to specify some commands as hidden. I personally like this option the best, since it's both easy to use for the host (no need to remember the right color to turn things invisible or such) but it also allows most of the [soulless bracketed mush] to be invisible in a game, should the host want it

5. Leave everything the way it is.
This is the most transparent option. Nothing shifty can happen here and there's no real way to abuse the bot short of finding a legitimate bug in it. That said, it's also the most visible option: every command is clearly seen by everyone and some host posts may have five or more commands slapped on the end of them. In short, this option is safe, but a little messy.


And that's all I can think of. Anyone else is free to chime in with their own way to resolve this if they like.

Bumped for great justice! Surely there's more than four people who have an opinion on this...

You are wrong sir.

These all sound relatively close to eachother, kind of vague too.


I'd say either keep it the way it is or do a quick test run with all of those options but that seems a little messy. Maybe I'm missing something here? I'll read it again later.

They are rather close to eachother, but the issue as a whole seems a little nitpicky to me in the first place. There were enough comments about it that it seemed like some people cared a great deal about this, so I figured a poll wouldn't hurt.

1 & 2: You can do strange things such as turning commands invisible, spoilering them, making them impossibly small, etc. (And, for a while at least until I write something to deal with things, doing so incorrectly will give you impossibly small, spoilered, or invisible errors in your post.)

3 & 4: You post [[command]] instead of [command] and the bot will hide it for you when it parses the command. This ensures other players can see you made a command before the bot parses it.

5: The way it is now.

I don't see why people don't want option 1

Well, considering that for the purposes of hiding commands, option 3 is easier. Plus, if I'm not misinterpreting it, option 1 would let people put commands in size 29 bright pink comic sans if they felt like it.

Link Lab wrote:Well, considering that for the purposes of hiding commands, option 3 is easier. Plus, if I'm not misinterpreting it, option 1 would let people put commands in size 29 bright pink comic sans if they felt like it.

>implying someone would do that
And even if they did, being told to knock it off or be modkilled/DA-discipline would fix that. Would there be a way to put a size cap on how big the commands can be?

I blame Link for instigating those two. But seriously, Link, you say that as if we've had a history of doing that here (we haven't)

Scept wrote:Ya pink's not bright enough, m8.

Upset that I got the pink you wanted?

Well, that I saw coming. Also, I never implied we've ever did that or we ever would. I was trying to think of the stupidest thing we could do to commands with option 1.

At any rate, from a player's perspective, having the bot hide commands is easier and I think that makes it more likely to be used. Honestly, I don't think most of us would use size codes or color codes on the commands.

I don't know how easy it would be to implement option 3 but I imagine it'll be easier than option 1 since it would need extra stuff to give error messages properly.

Link Lab wrote:Well, that I saw coming. Also, I never implied we've ever did that or we ever would. I was trying to think of the stupidest thing we could do to commands with option 1.

At any rate, from a player's perspective, having the bot hide commands is easier and I think that makes it more likely to be used. Honestly, I don't think most of us would use size codes or color codes on the commands.

I don't know how easy it would be to implement option 3 but I imagine it'll be easier than option 1 since it would need extra stuff to give error messages properly.

Don't worry about how easy things are. I like a good challenge about as much as I like easy tasks, so it doesn't much matter to me which you all choose.

That said, it looks like option one is getting heavily outvoted. Sorry Nale.

Started working on option four today. Decided that 'hidden' commands will be size one font, colored the same as the background.

Taught the bot basic fundamentals of parsing hidden commands from a page, but have not yet added any logic to the game classes. So in effect, the bot should be able to read commands that are marked as hidden (as well as commands that are already hidden), but will not actually hide them yet.

I may be able to finish up enough for some testing tomorrow. We'll see.