NordicBots.com News

A little update.

Iceman_X@noreply.nordicbots.com (Iceman_X) — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 17:03:01 +0200

No this site is not dead.

We are still actively maintaining 211 requestable bots on QuakeNet (222 bots in total.) for your pleasure and support.

However due to active personal lives, and more focus on bug fixes, rather than new features or functions, this site has become very silent.

But fear not, we are still here.

For questions and/or help you can always join #nordicbots on QuakeNet and query our HELP database or ask an active staff member (People who are voiced '+v' are staff. People who are opped '+o' are active at the moment.)

If nobody answers, please be patient. As stated earlier, we have active personal lives, and are not always online or active. (kids/work/etc ..)
However we have many volunteers in the channel who are more than eager to help you out.

Thanks for choosing Nordicbots and we hope we can count on your support in the future!

- The Nordicbots Team

Website/Stats downtime

TheAvatar@noreply.nordicbots.com (TheAvatar) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:37:02 +0200

We experienced about 3� hours of downtime on our website and channel stats earlier today from around 17:00 till 20:30 CEST due to a defective power supply in one of our servers.

The power supply has been replaced and everything should be back up running again.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Trouble with stats updating

kayjay@noreply.nordicbots.com (kayjay) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 02:57:53 +0200

Hi there all of you,

We've experienced some trouble with the stats not updating as they should today. Hopefully we've now managed to sort out the problem, and the stats should be updating again just fine!

~ The NordicBots team

Suggest a new botname

dusti@noreply.nordicbots.com (dusti) — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:36:16 +0200

Hello everyone,

It's time to rename one of our bots and we need your help!

We would like you to suggest a nick you'd want to see as one of our bots. We'll then select 5 from the suggested ones and let you vote for your favourite, which will then become the new nick for our bot!

~ The NordicBots Team

UPDATE: Voting has started!

Since our own poll script wasn't an option, I threw it on my testforum
instead of an ad-powered site: link to the poll.

The bots have been updated!

soczol@noreply.nordicbots.com (soczol) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Hey Everyone,

Today we have updated our service to the latest release which we have been quietly working on. Below is a list of the changes and new features. We hope you'll like them. We'll also tell you about features that are coming soon.

Note: We are aware that today is April 1st, we promise that all of this is real and is here to stay and that this isn't part of some April Fools joke.

If you need any help with the new features or find any bugs after the upgrade, feel free to contact a staff member in #NordicBots.

Triggers

When we introduced triggers back in 2005 as simple feature to create custom commands/replies with our bots, mainly for clans looking to make commands like '!homepage' and '!members', we honestly could not have dreamed that they would become so popular.

In the years after that, triggers have slowly evolved from basic single-line replies, to multiline replies with arguments, commands, gameserver and weather information. In 2010, 5 years after the launch, we officially reached the magical limit of 100,000 triggers. This makes triggers by far the most used function in our entire service.

There's no turning around it: triggers are immensely popular and because of that we have decided to give that feature in particular a bit more love. We have rewritten most of the trigger system removing any old bugs that were there.

Below is a list of some of the changes:

Triggers no longer have to start with '?.!'
You can now start your trigger with one of the following characters: '!?.@#$%^&*()_+=|'":;/,[]_'. So basically everything not a letter or number!
Triggers are no longer limited to 10 arguments
You can now use an unlimited number of arguments. This issue would show up when using a commandtrigger like settopic, where the bot would only use the first 10 words in the topic.
Advanced users: You can now 'escape' the percent sign
For example '%%20' will print '%20' instead of writing '%' followed by the 20th argument. This means you can link to URL's containing '%' without the bot messing with your URL.

Coming soon: Write your own scripts..

It wasn't all bugs that we fixed, on the contrary.. We have been working on some functionality that will basically allow you to write scripts for our bots in your favorite web programming language such as PHP/ASP/ASP.NET (or get someone to write one for you if you're not into that :D), which will be executed when a trigger is called. We think this will open huge possbilities to what you can do with our bots.

Unfortunately we are still in the process of testing this, writing examples and documentation so we can't show it to you just yet. We really hope to have it available for everyone within the next few weeks. More information will follow soon.

We might be looking for some beta testers for this by the way, so if you are interested in either testing this as a user or coder, please let us know!

Coming soon: Timed triggers

We're also working on finishing timed triggers. Timed triggers will basically make your bot repeat a certain trigger every few minutes. You could make your bot send a channel message, or execute a script (once we finish that), etc.

We also hope to finish that feature soon, but felt we should tell you that it's coming already since lots of you are not happy with using +timedquotes to work around that, which we can fully understand. We hear you and are working to get this fixed as soon as possible.

Fresh out of beta: Weather Forecasts

Some lucky channels already had access to them through the beta !weather command, or used weather triggers: Weather forecasts for virtually any location on earth.

We are happy to announce that the weather functionality is now open for all. Simply activate the +weather channel setting and write !weather followed by a location on earth:

!weather Amsterdam
<^Donkey> Current weather in Amsterdam (Netherlands): Cloudy, 11�C (feels like 5�C). Wind: WSW 37 km/h. Forecast for tonight: Cloudy with a passing shower. Min/max temp.: 10/15�C
<^Donkey> Forecast for tomorrow: Cloudy with spotty showers. Min/max temp.: 11/17�C

This service is powered by AccuWeather. We'd like to thank them for supporting our free service!

Hooray! URL titles and YouTube support are here!

Some of you have requested it through the recent request for new features, some of you through IRC. And next to 'seen' (which we hope to introduce in the future) this must have been the most requested feature. So, we are happy to tell you that they are finally here: URL titles.

The url title feature, when activated with the +urltitle channel setting, will tell you the title of URL's written to your channel. For example:

bla bla, http://www.nordicbots.com, bla bla bla
<^Donkey> http://www.nordicbots.com - "#NordicBots - A QuakeNet IRC Service - News"

In addition we have added support for YouTube. Simply activate +youtube and when you write a YouTube URL in your channel (or a link that redirects to a YouTube URL) you will get information about the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK2tWVj6lXw
<^Donkey> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK2tWVj6lXw - Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (03:33), 2.711.237 views, 10.690 likes, 976 dislikes (by RickAstleytvSME)

And finally.. +infobot

As anyone using our bots most likely has noticed a lot of commands depend on +infobot. Disabling one of those commands meant disabling +infobot. Until now!

We have decided to split up +infobot into various seperate channel settings, these settings are:

+google - Google web search using !google (this has been shortened by the way, so it should be less spammy..)
+image - Google image search using !image
+translate - Google translation using !translate

Note: The original +infobot now only toggles the availability of the 'chaninfo?' command.

We have chosen to enable all these settings for channels that already had +infobot set. Feel free to disable them again if you want to.

Thanks

That's it for now.

I'd personally like to thank anyone that left their comments and suggestions on the Feature suggestions wanted newspost. We hope you'll like the changes we've made and appreciate any comments and suggestions.

Thanks for flying NordicBots!
~ The NordicBots Team

Downtime Notice: 2011-02-26 20:00 CET/GMT+1 [completed]

soczol@noreply.nordicbots.com (soczol) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 02:50:06 +0100

Because of a move to a different datacenter and internet provider our bots (and related services such as stats) will be unavailable, starting Saturday the 26th of February around 20:00 (CET/GMT+1). At that time this website will also lack major functionality. All pages related to IRC and our bots (chaninfo, stats, logs, etc.) are likely to be unavailable once the move has started.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

ETA unknown

We're not sure yet how long this will take. It involves physically (carefully - we wouldn't want to damage them) moving a lot of servers. No settings will be lost and once the maintenance has finished bots will automatically rejoin your channel.

Is your channel suspended?

As all our services are unavailable it's not possible to get your channel unsuspended. Therefore we will add 3 days to the expiration period for suspended channels. This should give you enough time to get your channel unsuspended once everything is online again, without losing any settings.

Update @ 2011-02-27 07:30 CET/GMT+1
Everything should be operational again. Please report any issues you might have. Thanks for your patience!

Feature suggestions wanted. You can help!

TheAvatar@noreply.nordicbots.com (TheAvatar) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 22:17:59 +0100

It has been quite a while since we made some ground-breaking new features for you to use in our bots and we think it is about time that something new happened.

In the past we have introduced features like triggers (one line, multi line, weather), stats customization, bad words, command character, etc. and have extended several old commands with additional features.

Those were primarily features we figured would be nice to have. This time we would like to ask you, our users, what you think is missing. That could be some function you've seen elsewhere, something else you think could be nice to have, or just some crazy idea you have in mind - within the limitations of IRC of course.

So - it is all up to you - drop a comment below (requires a user account on this website, it's free and takes less than a minute to create!) with your ideas; anything is welcome.

-NordicBots Staff

Bots down

soczol@noreply.nordicbots.com (soczol) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:04:41 +0200

Hello Everyone,

It appears that we had a small network outage (~10 minutes) on our side. These outages do not happen often, but when they do happen our bots will normally reconnect just fine once the connection is up again. Unfortunately something appears to have gone wrong today: A protection system at QuakeNet's has identified some of our bots as 'Flood clones' which caused them to get G-lined (banned from QuakeNet).

We are not sure how long this G-line lasts and we are doing all we can to get our bots online again as soon as possible.

Please be patient while we resolve these issues. Thanks!

Update 11:00: We are disabling the G-lined bots and are attempting to get as many bots online as possible.

Update 11:14: Done! 145 bots are online. The following 64 bots are still offline:

Year2003, Year2005, Year2010, ^Aragorn^, ^Athena^, ^C00ki3^, ^Cistron^, ^City-17^, ^Emin3m^, ^Frodo^, ^GameBoy^, ^Half-Life2^, ^Half-Life^, ^Hercules^, ^Hobbit^, ^Huba^, ^KaZaA^, ^l0l^, ^Narusegawa^, ^Naruto^, ^Quake4^, ^Rap^, ^Royal^, ^RRR^, ^SecretOfMana^, ^SeriousSam^, ^Shinobu^, ^SkrotNisse^, ^T-Offline^, ^TF2^, ^Toto^, ^Virgin^, ^WhirldWind^, ^WoW^, ^XxXxXxXxX^, ^Yucko^, |Apocalypse|, |BattleBot|, |BrainLess|, |Chrissie|, |Dolly|, |Eggdrop|, |Flood|, |Freelancer|, |Gimli|, |Gondor|, |Hurricane|, |Janeway|, |LineageII|, |Logitech|, |m0o0oo0o|, |MadeMan|, |MiddleEarth|, |Mofo|, |Nordic-Help|, |PhoenixII|, |Prime|, |Protector|, |Qlogged|, |RainBow|, |Sk8er|, |Suckz0r|, |UvD|, |Xbox-Gaming|

Update 14:40: The G-lines appear to have expired after 12 hours. All our bots should be back and we're fully operational again. Thanks for your patience!

Note: Please contact us if your bot is still missing,.

Happy birthday shitbreak!

segumisama@noreply.nordicbots.com (segumisama) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:10:05 +0200

First birthday in September!

shitbreak is the newest, one of the youngest, and one of the more dedicated staff members in Nordicbots!

Everyone at Nordicbots thanks you for your hard work, effort, and time that you put into the service :)

We hope you have an amazing birthday!

-The Nordicbots staff and segz-

Happy Birthday!

segumisama@noreply.nordicbots.com (segumisama) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Happy 28th and 21st birthday soczol and munk!

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