Board Thread:Ask the Staff/@comment-5518179-20151226191600

Hello, my name is Akrivus, host and coder of Holographic Pearl, or Holly, a chatbot that's been marked and active here since August.

Holly is based on Sactage's chatbot code, with multiple modifications in order to perform many simultaneous tasks, allowing her to gather statistics from messages, chat joins, kicks, bans and other inputs so that she can detect spam, caps-locking, excessive formatting, and a Scunthorpe-free method of swear detection. She has embedded kick rules to detect if mods are online or offline, an extensive logging system with configurable looping intervals, and because she's been my main and only project for the past couple months, a very active codebase. I'd like to point out that Holly is not a chat moderator, but a chat tool, and that many of her previous features such as conversations, games and reminders were removed to prevent spam and in the pursuit of following what she is supposed to be, a tool, rather than a target of chat abuse and rule breaking.

In the coming days I plan to purchase a VPS (virtual private server) from Amazon to allow me to run Holly year-round so that she can be in chat all day, all night, and auto-moderate with the help of the policies that both I and the other mods can establish with the sets of commands found in her documentation.

What I want to know before I buy a VPS, is if continuing Holly is worth it, and what I mean by that is, do the admins and community trust me (and the bot) with performing these tasks? I am aware that the changing of seasons is leading to a bigger need for chatbots, causing more, often times inefficient bots to be hosted and promoted by admins who are likely more trusted, but less technologically experienced, than I am. I am also aware that the cause of some of this may be because of how inactive Holly has been due to my holiday vacation and lack of internet coverage I am experiencing, but once the VPS is bought in the coming days, Holly will be much more active than she ever was.

What do you think? I am open to suggestions, and I wish to hear your feedback. All I wish to hear is that paying for Holly's hosting is worth it and that I won't be replaced by someone less experienced or knowledgeable simply because they are more trusted. In essence I want to be the technological overlord and all much bow down to my gigantic ego. In essence I want to pay to keep this place's chat covered with something that is known to work well, and to be able to not have my money wasted until I decide to cut funding in the course of... well... I'm not really at the liberty to say...

I'm also going to use this last part to shamelessly promote my coding skills; I have six years of experience in coding, and I profess greatly in Ruby, JavaScript, HTML and CSS, so if anyone needs coding expertise, send me a Skype message or shoot me through my message wall, don't worry my skin is made of kevlar. 