The VimDiesel -- the unofficial FreeBSD IRC helper bot

This document is WIP.

• !ask – reply with “Please don't ask to ask a question, simply ask the question, all on one line and in the channel so that others can read and follow up easily.”
• !paste – reply with “For posting multi-line texts in the channel, please use https://dpaste.org”
  • install a pastebin on bsdlabs.io
• !bug (\d+) – reply with a summarized link to bugzilla, eg: “Issue $1: https://bugs.freebsd.org/$1 – <summary>”
  • or even better multiline response: 1. Link + title, 2. summary
  • vary on “bug” and “issue” trigger keywords
  • add autoparse-autopost capability in #freebsd-bugs, so whenever someone mentions “issue 12345” the bot would respond as if “!issue 12345” was called
• !portsmon … – give a link to portsmon, variants:
  • portsmon <name>
  • portsmon <category>/<name>
• !latest – reply with latest supported versions, eg. “Latest FreeBSD versions are 11.0-p1, 10.3-p9 and 9.3-p47”
  • Find a way to parse these automagically, from svn or something
• !faq <topic> – the FAQ command would summarize and link some frequently asked topics, for instance:
  • !faq graphics → link to the FreeBSD graphics stack wiki
• !man man(1) – link to the manpage for given item, ideally parse out the title from the manpage and give something like “<title>: <link>”
• see if URL shorteners can be used, as various links to freebsd docs, manpages, bugs, etc… can be verbose
• !news – list latest news via FreeBSD news RSS

Ideally, many of those commands would have a way to direct the answer to a user. For example:

• !faq graphics | blackflow – this would prefix the output with “blackflow: ” so the user is highlighted
• !faq graphics > blackflow – this would cause the bot to PM blackflow with that output, and in the channel it would say something like “blackflow: I just PM'd you with info”