Maz's calendar. [IRC user data storage planning]
In Maz's calendar this year is a year of bot writer's block. :D
Well well well. Before anyone kills me for mentioning IRC bot, let me explain. I have a friend who has been keeping up a few websites during his life. Usually community driven sites, where people do "know" each others. With "know" I mean that they really have an internet community, exchange thoughts, play games and so on.
His newest project is an old pen and paper style RPG, but at this time it is being played on IRC.
I have written a few IRC bot scripts (trivia/anagram games, stats collection etc).
Now I decided to start a new hobby project, yet another IRC bot :) But this time I thought I'll create a more generic bot engine, which can be easily extended by adding C callbacks to it. And actually possibility to call some php scripts on web server.
The main goal for me is to create a engine for others to use. But I would also like to do a favour to my friend, and make a bot he could utilize in his IRC RPG. But I encountered the same problem as always with bots. How to do reliable user identification, without giving users extra burden of registering to a bot / giving passwords etc (I assume there is no reliable way, I guess I need to make it configurable if password based user identification is used, or if some other method like hostmasks is preferred)?
Another question is: How to store the user information?
Somehow I just cannot do any kind of decision in this matter. So if someone has done something similar, or has thought of making something like this, could you give me some fresh ideas?
Oh, and if someone became utterly curious, I do have my work in svn repository, at here:
Revision 67: /
bugtracker here:
Teotilcan Bugtracker
and also online project management (using dotproject) - but I doubt anyone is interested in seeing that :D
And if someone for some godforsaken reason does inspect the stuff in there, drop me a note about bugs etc :)
But my idea was not to advertice the project, I was asking if anyone has ideas about how to keep track of users between IRC sessions?