Looks like Repbot is back - sort of.  It's called Repbot NG, and you can't complain or vouch (at all) but otherwise it seems to be the same.  Oh, and RepbotNG Help gives some warnings about it not being anything to do with Patti or FIBS.  Not sure if it did that before.

Hopefully it's a work in progress and will soon encompass all of Patti's requirements.

The interesting thing for me is that it integrates right back in with CocoaFIBS!

PB

Your observation is correct, I'm running that bot from home using the database snapshot from April 30th 2008 23:00 UTC. Vouch and complain is currently disabled as it doesn't yet comply to Patti's requirement, which is a time limit that allows vouches/complaints only some time after a match (maybe 12h). Adding this code is work in progress.

I'm more or less taking over repbot maintainance, as avik doesn't react to email for 4 weeks now. The moment he comes back I'll happily hand it back if he wants to. For the time being I will migrate the code repository on sourceforge to my own project "openfibs" so the changes are transparent. I'll likely do minor other changes, such as porting the code to Java5 and add a blacklist for bots, which should not be allowed to vouch/complain automatically IMO. We have the gBot* abuse case on that.

As for hosting, I got 2 offers for a 24/7 hosting so far, but no shell access is possible for me yet. Once I get there, RepBot will be back permanently. Until then it only runs when my home machine is idle. If someboy wants to offer hosting, that is welcome still. Requirement is SSH access, a mysql 5 database, Java5 and about 100-200MB of permanently used RAM. CPU load and network traffic are moderate to low.

Please don't ask for new features currently, the bot is even back and running stable yet. I will use the sourceforge infrastructure to maintain bugs and feature requests later and post the respective URL here. FibsBoard can be used for ChitChat still, but I feel a real bugtracker is better suited to manage RepBot development.

That's it for now, I'll keep you updated of further developments.

Courtesy of jugger, RepBot now has a new permanent home. Thank you, juggler!

Right. The problem here is how to carry over the old database. One could simply reset it, but I feel that this would be like throwing away an asset. There is a lot of information in that DB, but unfortunately also abuse. I've talked to Patti about that and we figured out a way for sensible data cleansing. As the DB due to this will change, and it is a lot of work to maintain and synchronize several versions of the DB, it will be made "hot" again only after all the cleaning up took place (and after the DB is in it's final home, juggler's server).

The cleansing plan is like so:
1) All vouches/complaints from bots will be removed
2) All vouches/complaints from players who never played each other will be removed

2) becomes possible courtesy of the donation of old log data, but that step will take some additional time.

So consider the current DB to be a read-only snapshot as per April 30th, which will be thrown away later. It is there because that is still better than nothing, but not yet the real McCoy, which will be a purged (as per 1 and 2) DB based on the last known backup from April 30th.

P.S. To make the info complete: Since a long time repbot honors the lifecycle of users on fibs itself. If a user expires on fibs, so will all his vouches and complaints on repbot.

It was *supposed* to do that before, and I was assured that it did.  I suspect it either didn't do it at all, or did so inadequately.

I've copied the RepBot sources (latest version from trunk) to a new SVN home, as only avik can change them in the old location. The SVN history unfortunately did break because of this, change history was reset. The new development home for the time being now is http://sourceforge.net/projects/openfibs/

You can browse the source there and look at the changes to the original code. The most strinking changes so far are:

- build system was changed, was Ant and now is Maven2
- required Java version was changed, was 1.4.x and now is 1.6.x (likely 1.5.x will do, but not tested yet)
- minor fixes due to a date parsing bug which assumed RepBot runs on an OS with an EN_US locale, mine is DE_DE.

Translation, please, and let's not degrade inim, please, either.  He's doing us a great service, after all.   

Btw, who is GroBmaulfrosch, anyway?

Ty............socksey



"The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." - Ronald Reagan

RepBot is now functionally complete as per Patti's requirements, a release candidate version 2.0.0-SNAPSHOT has been deployed. Please note that the underlying database is not yet purged and will be reset in a few days for a last time. Nevertheless, please vouch and complain as usual to help me to test the changed code. Report any issue you find in this thread (prefered), or via message to  inim if that is not possible. Thank you!

Here is a brief list of user visible changes and caveats.

• 24 hours grace period: Vouches and complaints are enabled again, but are only allowed within 24 hours after the last match event (see definition below). Withdrawls of opinions are possible at any time. See example code output 1 for the new messages for denied opinions.
  
• Match Events: Match events are proper match starts, resumes, completed matches, and irregular match endings. Irregular endings include logouts via the "quit"-type commands, network errors, admin kick, "closed old connection" errors, connection timeouts and connection drops -- in short all known ways to drop a running match.  Any new match event restarts the clock for the 24 hour grace period.
  
• Random disclaimers displayed: Every 1 in 10 replies a disclaimer text is randomly added after the result of commands mentioning saved games (ask, friends, help, saved, list). See example code output 2. I am interested in particular if this new output causes problems with any client or bot, please report respective observations in this thread.
  
• New help topic: A new help topic "help disclaimer" was added, so the new disclaimer is always accessible via the help system.
  
• No self-complaints anymore: You are no longer allowed to complain about yourself. This has mainly techical reasons, it allows for a database optimization and shouldn't really hurt anybody.
  
• Database is still scratch: While vouching and complaining is enabled again, for a brief transitional period of a few days of beta testing new opinions will be lost later. The current DB will be replaced with the purged version of the backup from April 30th, 2008. This change will be announced here and in shout in time.
  
• Sources are available: The modified sources are available for review, see http://openfibs.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/openfibs/modules/repbot/
  
• Timer reliability: Great care has been taken to make the 24 hour grace period as exact as possible, but there is a systematic error of give and take one minute. The worst case scenario happens when RepBot restarts, and a running match (started before the bot restart) ends irregularily. In this case the 24 hours are still active, but only counting from the last match event, which typically is the match start. The only scenario in which RepBot completely fails to recognize a match is when it is started while the bot is down, then ends irregularily, and is never resumed later. As RepBot's average downtime per day is only a few seconds, this case should be neglectable.
  

Example code output 1:


Example code output 2:


Enjoy!

Result!!!

Thanks Inim!

PB

ditto !!