An IRC bot called Peanuts

An IRC bot called Peanuts

[Felix Lechner via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.]

Hi everyone,

Today I received this private message:

    "hey, as i said before, your bot "peanuts" is fucking
    annoying. it floods the channel too much. the only feature i find
    useful is "bug !12345" but other than that it's just stupid and
    annoying. please fix asap."

Unless anyone expresses appreciation, I plan to turn the bot off in the
near future.

Kind regards
Felix

Re: An IRC bot called Peanuts

[Jack Hill]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 402 bytes --]

On Tue, 25 Jun 2024, Felix Lechner via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution. wrote:

> Hi everyone,

Hi Felix,

[…]

> Unless anyone expresses appreciation, I plan to turn the bot off in the
> near future.

While I don't find peanuts that helpful to me personally, I did want to 
express my appreciation for trying out an idea to improve our chat. 
Thanks!

From the gallery,
Jack

Re: An IRC bot called Peanuts

[Leo Famulari]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2024 at 01:56:44PM -0700, Felix Lechner via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution. wrote:
> Today I received this private message:
> 
>     "hey, as i said before, your bot "peanuts" is fucking
>     annoying. it floods the channel too much. the only feature i find
>     useful is "bug !12345" but other than that it's just stupid and
>     annoying. please fix asap."

It's an opinion. I wish that whoever said that would have said it in a
more friendly way. We try to avoid communicating so harshly within Guix
and I hope they learn to do that.

> Unless anyone expresses appreciation, I plan to turn the bot off in the
> near future.

I like when it shares links to bug tickets and commits. But sometimes,
it echoes links that have already been sent, even in direct response to
the links. For some of us, it's obvious where to find that info, but
others may have no idea. I wonder if it could learn a more sophisticated
way to decide when to share the links or not, and maybe to condense the
information a bit.

Re: An IRC bot called Peanuts

[Juliana Sims]

Hi Felix,

Firstly, I feel this person could and should have expressed their 
frustration in a more polite way. I'm sorry someone has taken to using 
such fierce and critical language for something you've worked on. I 
hope that you're not too hurt by their rudeness.

Secondly, I quite like peanuts. It's handy to get an idea of where a 
link will take me before being taken there (and potentially 
misunderstanding a link or wasting my time waiting on a page to load 
just to find out what an uninformative URL points to), and it's handy 
to have references to Guix issue and patch numbers automatically turned 
into links to those issues and patches.

As a final note, for the rest of the folks reading guix-devel: please 
don't cuss at people about their work, nor use ableist insults to 
describe it, please (nor do those things *at people themselves*, though 
I trust y'all to know better than that already). Criticism is good and 
should be couched in polite, ideally positive terms (eg "I find peanuts 
annoying; could you reduce or eliminate its output?" would have been a 
better approach).

All the best,
Juli

Re: An IRC bot called Peanuts

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> It's an opinion. I wish that whoever said that would have said it in a
> more friendly way. We try to avoid communicating so harshly within Guix
> and I hope they learn to do that.

We not only try, we actually enforce a code of conduct.

(This one was a private message though, so there’s little we can do
until/unless this behavior repeats, comes from a community member, and
Felix escalates to co-maintainers, who are currently responsible for
enforcement.)

> I like when it shares links to bug tickets and commits. But sometimes,
> it echoes links that have already been sent, even in direct response to
> the links. For some of us, it's obvious where to find that info, but
> others may have no idea. I wonder if it could learn a more sophisticated
> way to decide when to share the links or not, and maybe to condense the
> information a bit.

Likewise, I like resolution of bug numbers and commit IDs, but I find
that echoing the title of HTML pages is often redundant and unnecessary.
Overall though, it’s helpful to me; thanks for working on it, Felix!

Ludo’.

Re: An IRC bot called Peanuts

[Andreas Enge]

Hello Felix,

Am Tue, Jun 25, 2024 at 01:56:44PM -0700 schrieb Felix Lechner via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.:
> Today I received this private message:

like others, I am appalled by the use of offensive language; in the
absolute, but even more so as it is directed at a volunteer trying
something out to make people's lives easier and to advance the Guix
project.

Concerning peanut, maybe I am naive, but I was mildly annoyed when there
was this new person on the channel echoing back parts of my own messages;
it took me some time to understand this was a bot (maybe because my naive
understanding is that on IRC I am connected to real people). So whatever
the outcome of the discussion, I would suggest to add "-bot" or "[bot]"
or something like this to its name.

Apart from that my impression was that there was not that much usefulness;
for instance, just taking the beginning of today's channel log:
<redacted>Have you tried using the importer (recursively to pull in dependencies)? https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-import.html#index-go
<peanuts>"Invoking guix import (GNU Guix Reference Manual)" https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-import.html#index-go
...
<redacted>JetpackJackson: here's the output of `guix import go -r github.com/sebas05000/hydroxide` for me: https://pastebin.com/DhFKfwtA
<peanuts>"output of guix import go -r github.com/sebas05000/hydroxide - Pastebin.com" https://pastebin.com/DhFKfwtA

These are indeed just repetitions of the previous messages, adding the
title of the web page, but which turns out to also be essentially what
the previous poster said.

Another example of yesterday:
<apteryx>I think gnu.org infra is down at large currently
<apteryx> https://hostux.social/@fsfstatus/112678216190653742
<peanuts>"FSF Out of Band Updates: "We are currently having issues with one of our ce?" - Mastodon Hostux" https://hostux.social/@fsfstatus/112678216190653742

There indeed, the title adds some additional information without having
to click on the link.

Making peanut more "intelligent", speaking up only when it can add useful
information, is probably a difficult task. But maybe it would help to
discuss which problem peanut is supposed to address?

In any case, as others have said, thanks for trying things out, which may
or may not prove helpful in the longer run.

Andreas

Re: An IRC bot called Peanuts

[Andreas Enge]

Am Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 03:31:00PM +0200 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
> Likewise, I like resolution of bug numbers and commit IDs, but I find
> that echoing the title of HTML pages is often redundant and unnecessary.

Maybe this could be a good summary ("consensus") of what people have
expressed (including, ironically, the original rude private message)?
Keep reporting details on issues and commits, and drop other messages?

Andreas

Re: An IRC bot called Peanuts

[Felix Lechner via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.]

Hi Ludo'

On Thu, Jun 27 2024, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> I like resolution of bug numbers and commit IDs, but I find that
> echoing the title of HTML pages is often redundant and unnecessary.

Following the cue from Andreas [1] I disabled the generic HTML
titles. [2] That ought to address the general unhappiness about
parroting the useless titles of paste sites, especially
paste.debian.net.

I kept the expansion of SRFI and RFC numbers for now.  For the time
being, I also kept the expansion of Guix commits.  As a Magit user I
have easy access to the hashes but not to Savannah URLs.

The HTML titles from Savannah remain useless because their Ggit is eight
years old.  I hope the FSF will upgrade eventually.

As a side note, there is no need for code-of-conduct.  Many people would
be surprised to learn who wrote, but I've done enough damage for now.
According to Kabbalah, justice is the opposite of compassion.

May love and understanding rule the world.

Thanks to all the upstanders who chimed in. [3]

Kind regards & and a good weekend,
Felix

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2024-06/msg00317.html
[2] https://codeberg.org/lechner/irc-helper-bot/commit/8206cd196425d675f96c0550761f7b2dcbd6cb32
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnUX9iGxWkI