One of the issues that was brought up was that there was a bit of a flood of badly filled out cabal/stack projects uploaded at one point, so the channel got treated to a lot of "foo: Initial project template" announcements. Not much a bot can do about that, but it does increase the frustration level in-channel a fair bit and make people wonder if an announce bot is worth the trouble. On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 9:51 PM, Jay Sulzberger wrote:

On Tue, 27 Dec 2016, Simon Michael wrote:

Hello all,

...

hackagebot is the bot I've been maintaining for a few years which announces new hackage uploads in the #haskell IRC channel. I've tried to keep it "a well-behaved, non-annoying bot". It's configured to announce up to 5 uploads at a time, with at least a 5 minute interval between announcements.

As our community grows, upload activity increases, and more megaprojects with many uploads appear, I've seen more complaints about the noise, and noticed channel ops muting it temporarily. A few weeks ago this happened, and also a possible problem with the correctness of the announcements or the feed was reported. I didn't have time to investigate, so I left it offline, inviting feedback if anyone missed it.

Since then I've heard nothing. So, even though I personally like seeing the uploads, and the conversations and connections that sometimes result, I'm inclined to let hackagebot rest indefinitely. Or, would a new maintainer like to take it on ? If you have feelings about it one way or the other, please reply on-list.

Thanks! -Simon

Perhaps one could send a signal to hackagebot telling it to not send announcements, or perhaps to queue 'em up and then send a batch when requested. Or maybe have the bot just send a pointer to today's web page with all of today's announcements, neatly laid out.

oo--JS.

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Am 28.12.2016 um 03:51 schrieb Jay Sulzberger:

Perhaps one could send a signal to hackagebot telling it to not send announcements,

If one person requests a list, then others might be annoyed because of the noise; moving from push to pull is not a solution for noise. If announcements are to be curated, a bot could be made to post something only on request. Maybe one could integrate a one-line text input field on the upload page on Hackage: In-chat announcement (why is this upload noteworthy?): [______]

or perhaps to queue 'em up and then send a batch when requested.

Or maybe have the bot just send a pointer to today's web page with all of today's announcements, neatly laid out.

The value of chat is that it is instant. For other delivery modes, other media are easier to use: - A mailing list for batched updates. - A web page for people who prefer to pull info when they want it.

On 12/27/16 10:07 PM, Chris Wong wrote:

Hi Simon,

I maintain an analogous bot for the Rust community, [1] which also happens to be written in Haskell (for frivolous reasons). I thought it would be useful to share my experience.

...

... As our community grows, upload activity increases, and more megaprojects with many uploads appear, I've seen more complaints about the noise, and noticed channel ops muting it temporarily. ... To avoid drowning out discussion, we moved all the bots to their own #rust-bots channel. This solution has worked well for us so far, and lets my bot run with a looser rate limit (20 uploads per minute). We announce compiler+stdlib changes and CI results on there as well.

...

Since then I've heard nothing. So, even though I personally like seeing the uploads, and the conversations and connections that sometimes result, I'm inclined to let hackagebot rest indefinitely. Or, would a new maintainer like to take it on ? If you have feelings about it one way or the other, please reply on-list. I guess another solution could be to batch up these announcements, and if there are too many of them, send them in a condensed form. Something like this:

[hackagebot] New: twilight-0.1, pinkie-0.0. Updated: applejack-0.3.7, rarity-1.0.1.1, fluttershy-4.3.2. [hackagebot] Read more at https://hackage.haskell.org/packages/recent

This may be better than the "separate channel" solution if we want to encourage conversation about these new packages.

I would be happy to take on maintaining hackagebot. Since I'm already running one package announcer, adding a second shouldn't be too much of a burden 😉. It'd be interesting to see if the two code bases can be merged, and if we could rewrite the bot to use irc-core [2] instead of a home-grown thing.

Chris

[1] https://github.com/lfairy/hircine/tree/master/brigitte [2] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/irc-core

Thanks for the replies all. Chris, thank you for your offer! I hereby transfer hackagebot to your care. Contact me directly (simon@joyful.com, sm on freenode) for any help needed. Best, Simon