Hi,

I want to gather some opinions on @[email protected]. It’s a bot posting math dailygames every day. I checked the last 14 days. Nobody commented on the bots’ posts, it barely receives any reactions at all.

I think the bot should stop posting games. I prefer active games over a bunch of automated empty threads. Quality over quantity.

Small problem though, I don’t even know who runs the bot. Banning it should be the absolute last resort. I’ve written a DM to the bot, waiting for an answer.

What do you think about the bot?

  • squirrel@cake.kobel.fyiOPMEnglish
    4·
    17 days ago

    Hi, nice to know a username behind the bot. At some point I thought someone set it up and just forgot about it. A couple thoughts:

    It only posts to that 1 community, and it’s where most of the traffic the games get comes from.

    I wonder why noone at least upvotes the posts then. Is it all lurkers who play?

    The games themselves don’t really lean towards sharing your results

    Hmm… I prefer games in this community where results are easily shareable. I’ve refrained from posting games myself where it was hard or impossible to share results.

    This is just my own opinion and how I like to play dailygames. I don’t want to prohibit your games. I prefer not to moderate this community heavily or dictate my playstyle on others. If there’s no majority of users who are bothered by the daily bot posts, you don’t need to change anything.

    I’ve read that you intend to spruce up the posts a little. That’s a step in the right direction I think. And maybe you could space them out a little, so they don’t appear as this one pile of math games every day.

    • allywilson@lemmy.ml
      4·
      17 days ago

      Thank you for this.

      I’ve got my thinking cap on.

      Maybe allowing people to post their previous days result? Or maybe, a stopwatch counter (so you can post how quickly you did a puzzle)? Because they’re maths based it tends to be a single yes or no, rather than a continuous attempt at finding the answer.

      I wonder, if I post every day, but if you use your lemmy username as your name on the game, I’ll include you in the post and your solution for the puzzle from the previous day (you can view yesterdays solutions on the puzzle itself)?

      If it’s still not engaging with the above (hopefully I’ll find time this weekend to update), then I could stop the posts/combine them/lower it to weekly or similar.

        • squirrel@cake.kobel.fyiOPMEnglish
          2·
          15 days ago

          Very nice. The Lemmy integration is neat. Looking forward to getting a ping from the bot tomorrow.

          • allywilson@lemmy.ml
            2·
            15 days ago

            I hope it works as expected, difficult to test without a test Lemmy instance.

            Hopefully it introduces a level of discussion, I actually quite like looking at the way people get to the same answer via different means.

            I should be able to introduce this for the other puzzles, I guess the timing is still a question though - like, it rotates at 00:00 UTC, so I try to stagger the submissions with an hour plus 13 mins, or 17 mins, etc. but I think that will still appear as a “block” of submissions for people coming online in Europe and NA.

            • squirrel@cake.kobel.fyiOPMEnglish
              1·
              15 days ago

              It didn’t work, but I think it’s because I’ve saved my username only after I played. With the form being below the game I thought I could do it afterwards. I could test again, but lack the math skills to solve todays AddDown :) will try again later

              • allywilson@lemmy.ml
                2·
                15 days ago

                Yeah, the username is submitted when a successful answer is put in. I’ll leave it like this for a couple of days, see if it gets a bit more engagement if that’s Ok.