An IRC bot for alliances

[Banned]

Update New version released, see the bottom of the post.

This is an announcement of a new release of Munin, the Ascendancy IRC bot. Munin is used to handle the day-to-day running of Ascendancy, managing intel, recruiting, target booking and more. There's also a defcall handling module, but it's not quite polished enough to be useful yet.

Here's a list of all the non-admin commands available:

<@Munin> Munin help. For more information use: <~-\.!@>help <command>. 
                  Built-in commands: help
<@Munin> Loaded modules: add, addquote, addslogan, afford, aids, 
                  apenis, au, b, bashee, basher, bcalc, bigdicks, bitches, 
                  book, bumchums, c, cost, ****s, defcalls, details, eff, 
                  epenis, exile, exp, f, galchan, galmate, galpenis, 
                  getanewdaddy, gimp, i, idler, info, intel, invite, jgp, 
                  lookup, maxcap, news, planet, pref, prod, quits, quitter, 
                  quote, range, remchan, remquote, remslogan, res, roidcost, 
                  roidsave, rprod, s, scans, search, ship, slogan
<@Munin> , spam, sponsor, status, stop, surface, surprisesex, talk, 
                  tech, testpenis, unbook, unit, unsponsor, value, victim, 
                  whois, whore, xp

I've been meaning to get around to this for quite a while, but I wanted to remove the Ascendancy specific code smattered around in the various modules. In the end I didn't do it, but qebab stepped up and not only moved the Ascendancy specific stuff into a config file but also improved the code in many other ways.

With qebab's changes, it should be easier for me to release more often.

I'm releasing Munin's sourcecode because I think there's too much duplicate work by techies. Sometimes there is an advantage in having a unique feature, but more often code simply duplicates functionality that has been written a dozen times previously. It's easier to implement unique features if you're building on the work of others.

The full release of Munin is available here.

Munin's source is controlled with git on GitHub and the public repository is available here. I'm more than willing to consider any modifications, so go ahead and fork it.

For techies and HCs that want their alliance to run Munin
Munin's a bit of a hassle to set up properly. It requires Python and PostgreSQL, both of which are not commonly available on shell accounts. I'd recommending running it on a box of your own. The instructions for getting it to work should be fairly complete, but I haven't actually set up Munin from scratch in years, so there's a good chance they're not as good as they could be.

If you want help, I'm available on IRC (on #pawiki for example) to lend a hand or via email (my gmail account is named jesterina).

For people wishing to contribute to Munin
I've got a few things on my wish list for Munin. One is to move it away from using PL/SQL for some of the features, and tied to this is moving it to using a decent ORM (such as sqlalchemy). This should help in addressing the previous point by making Munin less dependent on PostgreSQL. There are some obstacles on this, among them that the layout of the database isn't terribly ORM friendly.

I'd also like to make the defense call modules more usable. I've got a few ideas on what to do here, but haven't gotten around to adding them.

Ascendancy members usually have good suggestions for new features that I never get around to making.

I've also started making statistics on what commands are used most, and at some point I'm going to go through the stats for round 26 and 27 (so far) and deprecate any commands that aren't being used.

Thanks to Idimmu, viCtory and qebab who have contributed to Munin's codebase so far.

Round 28 Update
Munin's been updated to deal with Round 28. In addition to some bugfixes, there are a couple of new features (see below for more.) The new version can be downloaded here. I've also come up with a simple versioning system (<round number>.<minor release>) to keep releases in context. If you're interested in always keeping up with the newest features (or even better, contributing back some new features of your own) you can use git to clone or fork the Munin repository at github.

Changelog

• Added agents and security guards to planet scans
• Created new !letmein command to handle invites to home when P is down (Thanks to mz for suggesting this)
• Fixed bug in !eff when using stats imported using putships.py
• Added system for storing and sharing phone numbers (non-members can use this too, without giving anyone in Ascendancy access to their numbers) (Thanks to JBG for suggesting this)
• Munin will now respond to commands given with a private reply prefix in channels with a maxlevel preventing normal reply (ie !intel will fail, but -intel will succeed if a channel doesn't normally have access to the intel command) (Thanks to Raging Retard for suggesting this)
• Hidden prod from planet scans now shows correctly on !planet command (Thanks to jerome for pointing this one out)
• Fixed bug in booking allowing booking of members due to casing mistake (Forgot who first pointed this out, but thanks)