#kitinfo IRC bot

Core structure

The IRC bot is structured into several components:

the core bot which maintains all other components
a modules system for bot activities
a providers system for additional services the bot must provide to the modules

A configuration file config.ini is used to define the bot's behaviour, e.g. which servers and channels to join. For each server a individual instance of the bot is being created, which can have individual modules loaded. Before first use of the bot, the example config.ini.dist must be copied to config.ini and modified according to ones needs.

Modules system

Modules are used to define the bot's activities like responding to users, listening for commands etc. To define when to act how, hooks are being used.

The bot provides several different type of hooks:

Command hooks: Methods attached to this hook will be called whenever a user mentions the specified command prefixed with a command identifier, usually a single special character like ., @ etc.
Action hooks: Methods attached to this hook will be called whenever the specified action is happening in a channel. Actions are all types of IRC events like privmsg or userJoined.
Regular expression hooks: Methods attached to these hooks will be called whenever a privmsg matches the regular expression.
Timeout hooks: These hooks can be used to call a function after a specified amount of time.

If the module requires additional service beyond the main features of the bot, it must define those services in a list called requires.

Provider system

The bot uses so called "providers" to provide additional services, that the bot does not include itself. These providers have to be placed into the folder providers as a python module.

Whenever a service is required by a module (per requires), the bot will load the additional service and provide it to the modules via an attribute provides in the bot class. Modules can then access their service through bot.provides[providername].

A provider must be implemented as a class Provider in a python file named according to the provider name. The class may implement any methods it wants, consumers will receive an object of the class and can use the methods.

Available Modules

Currently, the following modules are available.

Quiz

Quiz is a module to post a quiz question. It can load questions from jsonline-files (each line one JSON document) with a questions in this format:

{
    "question": "What is this bot's name?",
    "answers": ["broti"],
    "options": ["kuchi", "broti", "wursti", "apfeli"],
    "time": 30,
    "explanation": "The bot is called broti, because this contains all the characters from bot"
}

question and answers are required, options, time and explanation are optional. answers is an array of all correct answers, in case there are multiple possible answers. time is the time to wait before the solution is shown in seconds. If you do not specify time, a default time is used. explanation is an optional text that is displayed after the answer was shown. This can be used to explain why this is the correct answer.

Thus, a valid questions document example.json might look like this:

{"question": "What is this bot's name?", "answers": ["broti"]}
{"question": "Which is larger?", "answers": ["9"], "options": ["9", "5"]}

In this case, one question contains options that will be presented to the audience. The other question is without any options and the audience has to answer directly.

License

This program is licensed under the Simplified BSD License.

pcworld / broti