I would have never guessed how to request the bot, if you didn’t show it. That’s another reason why I think that there should be a standard way to request bots, it increases discoverability. For contrast, Roboragi:
{this} looks for anime
<this> looks for manga
]this[ looks for light novel
|this| looks for visual novel
You probably wouldn’t guess it from the fanfic link summary bot either.
I think that a simple common syntax that could be used is @!bot-name [options] [“]data to process[”], at least when users are requesting it regardless of community. It’s hard to hit it by accident, but still easy to type, and flexible enough to allow multiple bots to follow it. So for example:
@!fanfic-link-bot ao3 STORYID // looks for STORYID in Archive of Our Own
@!animanga-bot ln “story name” // looks for a light novel called “story name”
@!units-converter-bot grams “five cups of flour” // converts five cups of flour into grams
etc.
Then if community moderators are allowed to call bots to perform functions automatically, without the user requesting them, they could also set up synonyms as shorthands. for example people in c/fanfiction could simply type “ffao3 STORYID” instead, less keystrokes for the same result.
And you made me realise something: why the hell are the FanfictionBot, roboragi, wiki linking bot and the likes different bots, if they perform the same underlying task (provide link and summary)? We could have one bot to rule them all.
(Sadly I know why. Because Reddit never bothered to provide users with functionality. So they developed this functionality in parallel, wasting their development time with unnecessary redundancy.)
r/fanfiction and r/HPfanfiction have a fanfic link summary bot. you do linkffn(STORYID) or linkao3(STORYID) and it posts a summary. was useful.
I would have never guessed how to request the bot, if you didn’t show it. That’s another reason why I think that there should be a standard way to request bots, it increases discoverability. For contrast, Roboragi:
You probably wouldn’t guess it from the fanfic link summary bot either.
I think that a simple common syntax that could be used is @!bot-name [options] [“]data to process[”], at least when users are requesting it regardless of community. It’s hard to hit it by accident, but still easy to type, and flexible enough to allow multiple bots to follow it. So for example:
Then if community moderators are allowed to call bots to perform functions automatically, without the user requesting them, they could also set up synonyms as shorthands. for example people in c/fanfiction could simply type “ffao3 STORYID” instead, less keystrokes for the same result.
on r/fanfiction a link to the bot’s info is provided on the sidebar:
https://github.com/FanfictionBot/reddit-ffn-bot/wiki/Usage
But I 100% agree that something more standard would be called for for something more multi-purpose
And you made me realise something: why the hell are the FanfictionBot, roboragi, wiki linking bot and the likes different bots, if they perform the same underlying task (provide link and summary)? We could have one bot to rule them all.
(Sadly I know why. Because Reddit never bothered to provide users with functionality. So they developed this functionality in parallel, wasting their development time with unnecessary redundancy.)