Forum game bots

Arantor

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So I hang out on a very tech-savvy forum, it's pretty hardcore and not for the faint of heart. The Daily WTF is a blog about stupidity in IT, and it has a forum full of people as you might expect that enjoy that sort of thing - poking fun at other stupidities in IT while trying not to make more of our own.

But one of the things that happened is a couple of the regulars wrote bots to play games in the forum.

For example https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/26933/tdwtf-plays-minesweeper/ - it's a topic where a bot lets you play Minesweeper. The bot posts the current state of the board, you reply to say 'reveal m10' and it shows you the outcome.

There's been others, e.g. a bot for posting old crosswords from the NYT, or playing old 1980s text adventures from Infocom. I'm just sad I don't see more of these things.
 

Arantor

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Pretty sure you'd fit right in actually. Most of the regulars are programmers - so we see the WTFery up close - but anyone of a technical leaning is absolutely welcome. (Anyone less technical is also welcome, but most of the content might go over heads.)
 

Tiffany

Web Diva
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I really like that website name. :ROFLMAO: I think I'd fit in perfectly just by that phrase alone :D
 

Arantor

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The Daily WTF is a blog about stupid/bad things in programming - and a lot of the stories on it are pretty dry if you're not familiar with the concepts, and that is related to the kind of people who hang out at the forum.

For example, part of the reason there are bots on the site at all posting is because in 2014 the TDWTF forum was migrated from its legacy Community Server (buggy, insecure, lightly-hacked for comedy purposes) to a Discourse instance, complete with Jeff Atwood joining to lead the way in moderation - Discourse-style.

It's one thing to migrate forum software, and sign up to the mentality and paradigms that software has. It's _quite another_ for the lead developer to come on board, tell you that you're communitying wrong and starts proactively moderating a group of people who don't need moderating and are perfectly happy with their style of communication.

It gave birth to several memes, firstly because of Jeff's proclivities with 'you will stay on topic and I will split every topic that doesn't ruthlessly stay on topic', moving posts out of a topic is henceforth Jeffing posts.

But also, he tried to tell a group of (very) capable programmers that writing automated bots to post on Discourse was impossible. So they did it out of spite.

They've since moved on to a different platform again but the bots remained.
 
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