no list command

[ljharb]

There isn't currently any way to list all factoids. something like list would be ideal to list all currently known factoids.

[dsamarin]

Sounds good ideally, but ecmabot has way too many factoids to print. You can use the !find command to list the first 5 factoids that have the text contents of its argument. (If you call !find without an argument, then you get 5 random factoids)

[ljharb]

Any way it could support paging? ie list n where n defaults to 1 and represents a page of, say, 20 factoids?

[inimino]

As long as it only sends the list to one user and not the channel I think this would be fine.

[ljharb]

@dsamarin why close this? it's still a valid feature request.

[brigand]

It could create a gist with all of the factoids.

[ljharb]

I'd rather it print them out than dump an easily copyable list - that makes it easier to abuse.

[brigand]

What's the use case for this?

[dsamarin]

Might I suggest to @inimino a symlink to ecmabot-factoids.json on his server?

[ljharb]

The point here is a generic thing for oftn-bot, not just for ecmabot. And no, I don't want people getting that entire list, because then they will troll through the factoids, and delete, edit, etc.

[brigand]

If you're worried about that, then not listing them at all seems safest. But again, what's the use case for this? Why would I ever use the command if I wasn't looking to do evil things. It's not exactly user friendly.

[ljharb]

thats true. The use case is to know if something already exists so it can be improved, before adding a redundant new one.

Perhaps it's better not to have this feature, though, since any form of browsing makes abuse likely, absent a permissions system.

[brigand]

Then perhaps we could improve the search feature. If we only allow it in private messages then it could output multiple lines, one for each matching factoid including the contents, limited to say 10.

[ljharb]

The need for browsing is when there's nothing searchable, because I don't know the exact wording someone used in their factoid.

[hagb4rd]

as by now implemented already in babelboot (oftnbot too? irrelevant tho), any output beyond limit is pasted to gist (or whereever). right now the maxout is btw set annoyingly low when printing errors. so you like always have to open the paste to figure out even the error message.

pasting to gist would also allow to use markdown templates and/or prettyfiers in dependency of the output. talking about Errors, babelboot and gist: the template for errors would be such an example. using correct formatting that ^ marker is allowed to be useful.

but listing factoids doesn't seem very ambitious at all. how about making a js vm providing
providing bot l e a r n commands? could be implemented similarily to node's repl defineCommand .. and i mean as simple as above all. maybe generally parsing the text into arguments like via minimist or commander tho.

greetz, hag

[ljharb]

I don't think we want the bot to be fully dynamically configurable - that adds a bunch of security risks. The learn command is sufficient for now.