User talk:VoidBot
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Welcome Bot! Hello, VoidBot you silly bot, and welcome to Your Home! This place contains a wealth information about Robocode, from basic to more advanced. I hope you enjoy If you are posting a comment on this wiki, please sign your messages using four tildes (--~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date stamp. If you are not familiar with MediaWiki, these links might help you out:
If you need help, check out the frequently asked questions or ask it on this page. Again, welcome! --Rednaxela 00:31, 6 August 2009 (UTC) |
Oooh a bot? What's this for Voidious? Will it surf WikiWaves? :) --Rednaxela 00:31, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
Haha... Thanks for the warm welcome. =) Actually, I don't (yet) have any plans to make this bot update the wiki; I'm just fetching page contents with it for now. Doing it through a bot and a MediaWiki API library seemed much easier and more reliable than fetching and parsing raw URLs / HTML.
As for the purpose, I'm a bit skeptical that anyone besides myself will think it's all that cool, but even so, it seems like something fun to play with: I'm toying with the idea of automatically tweeting about new / updated RoboRumble bots at @roborumble on Twitter. (It's actually looking pretty easy with Net::Twitter and MediaWiki::API.)
A bit more complicated, but potentially way cooler / more useful, would be waiting until the rating stabilizes, then also including the rating(s) / ranking(s) in the tweet. Of course, I'd want to clear it with Darkcanuck before any program of mine starts fetching pages from his server, but I don't think hitting the rankings pages every few minutes would be that big of a load. (At least compared to how much I already hit them... =)) And I should also mention that PEZ deserves credit for putting this idea in my head while we were discussing @robowiki.
--Voidious, master of VoidBot, 00:59, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
- I've considered adding a simple public query page that would allow people to get raw data from the database. It would be read-only and probably enforce some light usage limits. I'd like to have this personally so I can run some data-integrity checks offline but it would also be useful for projects like this. Of course, the RR server could just send "tweets" for you when a new participant is added -- no need for polling. --Darkcanuck 06:31, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
- Actually... I was just recently thinking about doing some data-mining on the rumble data (i.e. clustering of all of the bots, to reveal interesting categories/outliers) and a raw query interface to get data would be kind of nice, espescially if it allows incremental fetching :) --Rednaxela 06:38, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
