The Tavern

If you ever come check out ##crawl on freenode you will be greeted with something like this:


This his been an ongoing problem ever since i started frequenting the channel years ago. Almost every regular user blocks or ignores the bots; absolutely noone cares at all about any of the milestones it announces.

Tt announces, amongst other things:
every single rune grab
every single death past xl 10
every single player reaching the end of a branch
every time a player kills a pan/hell boss
anytime a player is banished or escapes the abyss.

We have complained among ourselves many times but from what i understand, each bot is maintained by the admin of the server it announces milestones for. I'm not even sure who to talk to to change how they announce.

So i make this thread, to draw attention to the problem. Maybe we could get more traffic if the bots spam less, i have talked to some people who come to IRC only to notice bot spam and leave. here are a few more examples

new player getting drowned out by bot spam:


trying to have a conversation through bot spam:


another random piece of bot spam:


As you can see, its multiple announcements per minute, even during off peak hours. It is a truly ridiculous amount of spam that just to be clear i will say again, nobody in IRC pays attention too or cares about.

If any devs, server admins, bot maintainers, players, or members of the community agree that this a problem, maybe we can reach a solution?

Deaths should be announced. No-one in irc cares about unique kills, branch entries/ends (including abyss and portals), god worships/abandons, or rune pickups though, agreed.

It's bot spam all the way down:



Either remove the announcements entirely or just keep the ones announcing wins.

Maybe it's because I've already been in the channel a few months and am used to ignoring the bots most of the time, but I think you're exaggerating the problem. Unless you can only see a few lines of the IRC at a time, a few lines a minute isn't going to stop you from following a conversation. If a new player's question doesn't get answered with the bots, it probably wouldn't without them. If you come back to a wall of nothing but bot announcements, it doesn't mean they're spamming, it just means no one else is talking (which happens often in IRC).

That said, I agree with you that there's too much. Like duvessa said, there's a lot no one cares about. (I don't care when I get to Swamp:4, definitely not when someone else does.) I think the deaths and wins should stay, at least. Those actually matter to the player being announced, and sometimes are funny or interesting to others. (or someone in IRC can point upwards and complain/brag; imagine if we had to !lg first!)

There's one other thing that should stay no matter what. If you banish a unique, then kill it in the Abyss, it is announced. Removing this would be an Abyssal Knight nerf they don't deserve.

I've been using the IRC for the past two years and I agree that the bot spam is a bit ridiculous. Like Cimanyd said, nobody cares when you reach Swamp:$ or that you killed Nikolai. However, the win and death announcements are, I feel, a important part of the IRC experience in that it allows people to sympathize or congratulate each other. I can't tell the amount of times I killed a character with which I'd asked the IRC for a good amount of advice, and then had people saying "RIP" or "Better luck next time". These things really help to consolidate a feeling of community which is, for me and maybe others, one of the main reasons I keep coming back to DCSS.

So yeah, keep the bots for deaths and wins (or maybe really fringe cases that migh be interesting to see) and ditch all the other useless nonsense.

yeah, perhaps i exaggerated a bit. sometimes seeing a high level char die to an interesting monster or on the orb run can spark a conversation and if said player is a regular irc user we can provide tips or critiques on how they could have survived.
but there is so much spam about abyss enter/exits, rune grabs, 15 rune games killing hell bosses or entering branches it just detracts from the entire channel.

Surely we can strike some balance on what types of milestones and game finishers are announced....maybe only deaths above xl>20?? only deaths that break a streak?? or orb run deaths?

and announcing wins also could be a fun thing to do. especially when it is a players first win and everyone in irc channel congratulates them with suggestions on characters to try next.

but with so much spam, it seems like no one pays attention to any announcements at all, in years of using the channel, i can count on one hand the amount of times people react to a bot announcement.

The announcements made sense back when a lot less games were being played.

They should be limited to wins, and events likely to spark conversation or inspire watchers. Like orbrunning tomb, or megazigging, or deaths with tdam>200, etc.

Gawd, my name shows up a lot... I need to play less.

Do you realize that it's not typical to enter Abyss more than a couple times in a game, let alone more than 100?

Yes, I was grinding for a skill title, for my amusement. I wasn't intentionally spamming anyone but myself.

ok, i have read these replies and thought about it some more.

What if announcements were limited to the following:
-Wins
-Entering Tomb while holding the orb
-Entering a ziggurat after completed at least 1 ziggurat
-Any death where the player had atleast 1 rune
-Any death where tdam>200, or tdam>mhp

Alternatively, we can keep death announcements as they are currently, where any death over xl 10 is announce. There was no clear consensus that i could see. I think deaths with 1 rune(or more) and deaths where you take your total Hp in damage in one turn is a nice balance to limit them somewhat. I would be personally fine with restricting death announcements to streak breakers and orb runs but they seem to be popular

It used to be much worse. A couple years ago I had a thread discussing the bot announcements. The announcements were pared down dramatically, to about half of what they were before and the channel became much more conductive to discussion/advice. Since then, however, the playerbase has grown by a significant amount and we've picked up a few extra servers so the issue is rearing its head again.

mibe's current list of suggestions will be fine for another few years probably, but if the playerbase continues to grow parts of it may need to be trimmed. Of course we can just deal with that when we get to that point.

Nobody cares about those. We are at almost 24 thousand such deaths so far this year (since Jan 1).

If you restrict it to deaths with 10+ runes, there are 870 this year, which averages about three per day.


I looked into this, and my tdam>200 suggestion was a bit extreme. There have only been seven deaths like that this year, but 670 deaths with tdam >= 100 (50 of those had tdam exactly equal to 100). Two announcements like this per day seems reasonable.

What about deaths with 10+ or the orb in hand? (Ascent deaths are pretty rare aren't they?)

I already answered the 10+ rune deaths: 870
Wins: 10116
Orb deaths: I think it is 423 (10539 orb milestones minus 10116 wins)

edit: Frankly, nobody cares about 99% of wins, but they should still be announced, as a reward to the player.

Soooo what's the next step on this? Could someone from the dev team ask the bot owners nicely to cut down on milestones reported?

I think it would be great if it could at least be reduced to just one bot doing announcements for all servers instead of each server having their own.

Really the problem is just the community is too big to announce everything though. This is partly why I created my bot "Kramell", which allows you to get announcements for a small group of people in a separate channel, and I've found that fun to use during tourneys etc, just seeing the milestones for the few people added to the channel's whitelist.

Maybe a similar approach could work in ##crawl, so that there are only announcements for people who have registered, say with an easy command. It would at least filter out the masses of people who never even look at the ##crawl channel.

The announcement spam doesn't really bother me anymore, but I don't think I'd miss announcements if they were to go either.

My 2c

It's absurdly simple to make changes to the bot (for cbro at least). But I've always kept it consistent with the other servers (unless the other announcement bots made changes and I haven't been informed).

If people are actually avoiding chat instead of ignoring or /ignoring the bots, then I agree it's probably a good time to adjust limits. But that's not up to me since I'm just keeping consistent with the other servers.

My general gaming community uses a variant of Kramin's approach (different relay bot) and we actually relay ALL milestones since there's a large group of us who wouldn't get any announcements otherwise (I announce the minimal set on ##crawl and the ignored ones in #octolog), so moving towards something like Kramin's suggestion probably makes more sense long-term. Just set up ##crawl-announcements and all bots relay EVERYTHING there, and separate relay bots sift through it to announce whatever each separate room wants to see. That's a TON easier for server admins since we won't have to fiddle with the limits every 6 months when the spam gets too much.

So I've taken over ##crawl-announcements as a test site There's actually no need for the servers themselves to announce anything anywhere really, it's not hard for an independent bot to fetch the latest bits of the logfiles every minute and do the announcing, not quite as realtime but pretty close (this is how Kramell does it).

Win or death announcements are useless. You can't go and specate that game because it is over. I think <10% players play online and use IRC simultaneously (especially when beem (thx Gamma) was introduced), so you almost never can congratulate the player.
So only zig entering (for 2nd+ zig), orbrunning tomb, entering Pan/Hell without getting anywhere but dungeon and depths (DUPZ/DUHZ attempt), gabbing non-abyssmal rune within 10k turns (speedrunning attempt) etc. So only interesting games should be announced.
Also, please note server char-code in the beginning of every message so that IRC users can easily cast "watch" spell. I can't remember all that & for CXC, | for CLAN, ! for CAO etc.

FYI, you can get tons of high scores being considerably slower than <10k at the first rune.

It was just a suggestion, obviosly this number can be brainstormed.

I think it might be nice it the announcements were less limited for people who are on channel at the time, and more limited for people who aren't on channel...

I like the idea that only announcements of people in the channel at the time are displayed. You could even use the sequell !nick stuff to work more out. so if I'm on IRC as miek_ then it will know to announce miek and hypermiek and whatever else. It would also be nice though to have some way of saying "yes I'm logged into IRC and yes I'm playing crawl right now but please don't announce my games anyway"

+1, and this is completely doable. Perhaps even only post milestones of people who have been active in the last 8 hours or something. I like this method a lot better than simply filtering milestones more and more strictly, as if you do that you get to a point where you may as well just remove them entirely. Even posting purely wins has the potential to become annoying, esp. during tourneys etc. I like the idea of having generous filters but finding a way to only post for people who are actually using irc, to keep the announcements relevant.

Maybe I'll give this a shot after exams.