Rules for bots joining BU?

[>BKA< T Wrecks]

I know that maybe a Council member should open such a thread, but after following the discussion about GrogBot (which developed into a more general direction), I feel that a new thread, entirely dedicated to this topic, is justified. If any of the Council members disagree with this point of view, feel free to delete this.

To the topic: Aspirin and others came to the conclusion that there is a gap in the bots-united rules concerning bot programmers who want to join BU. Currently there are no clearly defined rules that specify which requirements a bot must meet in order to qualify for a bots-united membership. Besides, the example of POD-Bot clones like E[POD]bot and IvPBot, the authors of which have disappeared without even announcing their departure, has given rise to the question if and under which circumstances a bot can be excluded from Bots-United.

I ask all BU members, Council members and bot authors in particular, to use this thread as a public discussion platform to agree on sensible regulations concerning the two mentioned problems. I will post my own opinion later in a separate post to keep it apart from this posting, which I made as an introduction to a -hopefully- useful discussion.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

My opinion to this was summed up when Maleficus asked to join with FritzBot... I will repost it here verbatim, coz I don't have anyhing to add at the moment

In the end it does not matter who makes the first step, actually.

Well, you ask Post a request in the Agora with a public poll (yes/no) and as soon as a majority of council members vote 'yes', you are part of Bots United. We will then set up a website for you, a forum, a ftp/CVS/mail account and all the stuff on the basis of what you want or need.

Be present often and moderate your forum yourself if you want one, always be kind and helpful to all the other members, and cooperative with the other bot authors, do not abuse of the services (forum, web space, bandwidth, email accounts) we provide... common sense rules, in fact.

That you be coding a bot yourself, goes without saying I say this because we had lately a lamer with an almost void knowledge of coding, which was unable to do anything but to rip these bots of ours that are open-source, rename it and claim it as his work, and the kid officially asked *us* to join Bots United with his big fake It was a very funny moment of the BU story
The other requirement would be that you be developing it regularly and planning to release it some day (if you haven't done this yet), OR that your bot be already released and in case you don't want to continue working on it, you engage yourself to come regularly in person to check the forums and provide support for it to the BU members. You don't need to go open-source with it, but if you want to, that would be an interesting plus.

The design of your website will be completely up to you, but if you don't want to bother, Stefan has a nice webby template that both the JoeBot and RealBot sites are using, that you could use for your site too. You can do anything you can think of to generate interest for your bot, and we can hint all newcomers who are looking for a bot to have a look at yours and try it out. After that, it's completely up to you to do whatever you want... We will always be here to help you out whenever you ask, though.

Being part of Bots United will also give you access to our moderators' forum where you can take part in technical discussions about the server, etc. But that's nothing biggy since discussions there are in fact rare, most of our talks are open to public and happen in the Agora. We try to be as democratic as possible.

And if one day you manifest some interest in it, and that one Council member wants to withdraw, you may be able to join the BU Council which settles the general policy of Bots United.

[stefanhendriks]

Yes, as PMB mentions, these are the rules so you can JOIN. But i think we should also have rules to keep a bot part of BU. I mean; if one just is very motivated to get part of BU and once he is 'in', he will stop developing, there is no motivation for him/her to continue the bot. Although i know that bot authors code for themselves, and on BU for each other (ie, look at all those OPEN SOURCE thingies, its magic! )....

I'd say a bot should be atleast developed (if nescesary). Perhaps we should have 2 sections;

Bots In development (under construction)

Bots not in development, abandoned (or finished?).

THere is one problem here though, ie, like RACC has not been updated for 2 years, it is still being developed. As PMB says so, he pointed out very well that this relies on a sort of trust.

[>BKA< T Wrecks]

Ok, so the rules for joining BU could be briefly summarized as follows:

- The person requesting to join must be a real coder with substantial knowledge of a suitable programming language. This rule would serve to keep rip-off artists like (3)Colours out of BU.

- Bot must either be finished or under continuos "construction", i.e. not just for 3 weeks and then silence.*

- A poll in the Agora must be posted, and a majority of the council members must vote for the joining request.

*: I see this point as problematic. The intention behind is absolutely ok and understandable, but since we don't have any reliable prophets among us (or do we? ), it's difficult to draw a line, just as stefan pointed out. I don't think we have any effective means to control this. On one hand, we cannot force bot coders to code some stupid stuff just to prove that they are still developing, and on the other hand we can't kick everyone out just because there has been no visible progress for some time. I think all we can do is direct the potential new members' attention to the fact that we don't wish to have short-term members who then disappear without even giving notice of their steps.
This leads me to a suggestion I wanted to make anyway: As soon as we have agreed on a sensible set of rules, at least a sticky thread summarizing these rules should be posted in the Agora - maybe even a link or some text on the bots-united main page?

Concerning totally new and not-yet-released bots such as FritzBot, all we can do is trust and hope that things will evolve in a positive way. Maybe non-CS bots (or even non-HL bots should be treated with priority in this respect? After all, offering a wide selection of difficult bots can only be good "propaganda" for BU...
However, regarding bots that already exist, we can test them and/or watch the progress they make and use this as a basis for the decision. And if a CS bot cloned from PODBot shows exceptionally good performance and popularity, a decision can still be taken. It won't lead BU anywhere if we only accept the "purest" bots and totally disregard popularity.

Ah, yes. That brings me to yet another subject (you still awake? ). I suggest we don't remove discontinued bots from BU. A separate section, ok. Totally separated from the active forums (linked page or whatever), ok. But we'd better not forget the ppl out there who are in no way interested in coding, programming, betatesting, waypointing or anything - and if many of these ppl happen to like a discontinued PODBot clone, we would deprive them of a valuable source of very wide-spread knowledge if we removed the respective bot forums entirely.

[[BBB]sluggo]

Why not have a trial period?
When the majority of the council has voted YES then the bot gets into a trialperiod of # amount of days/moths/years (With full rights/privelegies?)
Then you can see what kind of person it is, and at the end of the trial period the council could have another vote to make the person a full member of BU?

[stefanhendriks]

not a bad idea at all Sluggo!

I would vote YES for that. We should set a term of a month or 2. But i think we should make it like this then:

- you can trial for 2 months, when its okay, you're 'in'
- you have to work on your bot (keep it updated so it works with the latest version of the game/mod you make your bot for).

The 2nd is like, when a new version (ie of CS) comes, the bot should be updated by its original author. If he does not do this, he/she will be warned/asked (mailed) to update. If there is no response there will be an X term before the bot is set to 'not supported' or 'not active'.

Ie, it could be like threads in a forum even. The less activity on a website, the more it goes 'down' on the list.. this should be doable right?

[>BKA< T Wrecks]

Sounds good to me! A trial period would also give forum members some time to d/l the bot in question and test it a bit... yes, that's a good idea!

A kind of "reaction" check (game updated = bot updated) is a nice idea as well, but
a) I don't know if some older or less wide-spread games / mods will see many updates (take RTCW as an example, or imagine Ricochet), so that this check might not even apply for them
b) In some cases, the bot isn't even released yet - think of PMB's RACC project. You can't expect him to react to CS or Steam updates with a new release as long as he doesn't have the basic programming for his bot done.

IMHO, the logical consequence to these two points is that the requirement to follow game updates would only apply to released bots, and only affect bots for games / mods that are still more or less regularly updated.
Some bots will simply fall out of this pattern - the question is if this is a catastrophe... I don't think so personally.

Anyway, the "2 months start trial" sounds good. How about a general absence check? Not announced absence from the forums for more than 1 month = warning(s) and eventually ??? yes, what? Ban? Automatic move of the forum to the "discontinued / 'idle' bots" section?

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

I have no preference for whether or not a trial term should be given to newcomers. The advantages of it have been sufficiently mentioned, but I see a drawback consisting in that our selection criteria will be lowered just because of this trial period which will be supposed to act as the final validation criterium. Problem is, many a lamer would prefer being hosted on BU for only one month (trial period), than not being hosted at all. How not to associate the name of Bots United with those who failed during this trial ? This is the main problem of this idea in my opinion. For myself, either someone is in, either he is out - there isn't "half out" or "about to become in" or such things. Either we caution a bot, and this bot has its name associated to Bots United and vice versa, or we don't caution it yet. That said, I understand very well the advantages you mentioned. I was just pointing the pending drawbacks in order to equalize the balance a bit.

Which brings me immediately to the next problem. What to do with the abandoned bots ? Do you want to continue associating the name of Bots United with these ? Consider this:
1. - about 90% of the public of these bots use them because that's the only bot they know, or, because they remember that some enlightened mate told them, 6 months or 1 year ago, that these bots were worth the try. Many of these guys simply haven't tried anything else. Face it.
2. - I defy anybody to enumerate me the differences worth of attention that exist between IvPBot, E[POD]bot, and the bare bones POD-bot 2.6. Any impartial eye who has tried them all can't say anything else than: they are rigorously identical. Some of them might have more bugs than the genuine POD-bot 2.6, even.
3. - Both KaCaT and LightNinja were pretty much aware of the requirements that being part of Bots United imply. They nonetheless disappeared from the traffic completely, without a single notification, a single explanation for their supporters, abandoned us completely, and I want for proof that they haven't even visited the place for months. KaCat: last visit on 27-02-2004 07:11 - LightNinja: last visit on 01-04-2004 13:52 .
These guys are not serious. The problem is not that they don't have time to update their bots, the problem is that they are simply not here for helping others out like it is their duty to be. Stefan is pretty damn well right saying that we're in fact doing the work for them. The people who use IvPBot and E[POD]bot are fooled into thinking that these bots are still in development and that they can expect help from their author here at Bots United. And WE, Bots United, are deceiving these people. Why ? Because we still caution these bots.

No mercy.

Even botman who drops here from time to time deigns helping the guy who is still fighting with his good old HPB_bot. And he's not forced to !!! since in order to thank him for his continuous support (YEARS of helping others out for free!) we assured him that we would ourselves provide the necessary support for this bot.

My opinion is that IvPBot and E[POD]bot should be given a short ultimatum (sending a nth email to their authors ?) and if nothing happens, boot the crap outta em. Simply. We did this already for PoXBot and we still know perfectly, all of us, that it was the best thing we could do.

And my opinion is also that all the users of these bots should be hinted to use another bot which would be worthier of Bots United. I'm sure sPlOrYgOn and his crew of coders would be happy to welcome new supporters. No shit. Keeping archives for outdated, abandoned, and buggy bots ? for free ? providing support for them ? whereas hordes of better alternatives already exist ? Now, to what FUCKING avail ?

Oh well, I guess you see my point.

[stefanhendriks]

Actually very good statements there PMB!

About the trial term; yes i think we both have very good arguments but i see your point very well. In fact, i'd like to side with you on this one. It makes things more clear for US but also for those who want to join BU. You are in, or not, not some mid-way. The most worst thing you can become is a fuzzy organisation!

I'd say, give them a few days. Hence, give them till next weekend (send a mail now) and on no response, remove their accounts completely. Let both IPV and EPOD refer to the new POD 2.6 by sPlOrYgOn and his crew. I think he deserves that!

[@$3.1415rin]

that'd be a possibility. or we at least create some 'dead bots' category on top and still let host that sites, but no files anymore ...