#cairnscentral has now switched networks.

irc.cairnscentral.net will work as normal, but now connects to Austnet

The Austnet network has many users and alternative channels, and is more localised to an Australian audience.

For more information about connecting to the network and channel, please check out the guide.

As many of you know, I’ve been making some additions to the iq bot recently to allow it to record channel logs and generate stats from them.  Some of the stats are still a little buggy, but it’s working pretty well now!

Coincidentally, the cairnscentral stats bot seems to have disappeared (Anyone know more than me about this?  Comment or let me know!) … strange timing on that.

Here’s a list of some of the new stats commands.

• .stat

  This command by itself will just return stats about you.  If you use .stat nickname it will return stats for the nickname given.  If you use .stat #channel it will return stats about a channel (currently it only monitors #cairnscentral, #1337, and my testing channel, #farce).

  Depending on what info the stats bot has been able to get about you, it will return (1) the number of different nicknames you’ve used, (2) the top x nicknames you’ve used (up to 5), (3) the total number of words you’ve typed, (4) the total number of letters you’ve typed and (5) the total time iq has recorded you as online.

  The stats it returns for the channel are (1) total words, (2) total letters, (3) average number of users and (4) highest user count.  More stats for channels may be added later.

• .topten or .ttopten

  This command gives the top ten users, in the order of the number of words they’ve typed.  .ttopten only gives results for the current day.

• .happiest or .thappiest

  This command gives the top ten ‘happiest’ users - those who have used a smiley emote.  .thappiest gives the current day’s results.

• .saddest or .tsaddest

  This command gives the top ten ’saddest’ users - those who have used a frown emote.  .tsaddest gives the current day’s results.

• .cheekiest or .tcheekiest

  This command gives the top ten ‘cheekiest’ users - those who have used a wink emote.  .tcheekiest gives the current day’s results.

A small bug / limitation summary is as follows:

• Currently the bot won’t record time online until a user parts or quits.  Sometimes it doesn’t record time online on a quit - I have yet to work out why.  If you call your own stats and find your time online looks weird, or doesn’t show up, this is why.
• The Ascends servers use an inconsistent ident / host combination to identify users, so I’ve had to fudge the ‘carryover’ user identification somewhat to accommodate this.  Generally if you use the same ident and are not always changing hosts when you connect, then you should be fine.  One small bug in this, is that if you join under one ident / host, but leave before chatting, it won’t see that first combo the next time you log in, and won’t be able to merge the records properly.  That means that sometimes we end up with two profiles with independent stats (bog knows all about this!).  I’m looking at different ways to solve this problem.

The next step in this project will be outputting the stats to a website of some type, and making the logs viewable online.  I will also be adding a ‘random quote’ command in the near future.

Please let me know via comments, chat or email if you have any requests for the bot, and also if you encounter any bugs that aren’t listed above!

- Shaun (||)

Marlor (Ascends admin) has generously offered to host iq bot on one of his servers.  This should greatly increase the bot’s reliability / speed, and will certainly help me along in developing new features (because I don’t have to worry about maintaining my own connection / os / hardware for the bot any more )

The iq bot has a new command - .bash - which will output a random quote from the bash.org irc quotes website.

The iq bot has been updated to support international location selection for weather reports.  For example, you can use the command .wz tokyo to retrieve the current weather report for Tokyo, Japan.  If a location exists in more than one country (for example, London is in both the United Kingdom and Canada), iq will tell you where the locations are, and give you the correct commands to use (in this case .wz london, gb for UK, and .wz london, ca for Canada).  There are a couple of lesser known countries that I wasn’t able to source the weather.com codes for, but weather reports for them shouldn’t be required too often

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