Hi guys. I wrote a suggestion some time ago about making a steambot that would monitor the gather activity on this site, and then relay the important information to who ever has added the steambot on their friendslist. Well it didn't get much traction, but it is autumn break, so I found some time to make it myself - infact it took me equivalent to an afternoon to get this far.

Disclaimer: This is still a prototype!

So let me briefly get in to more detail about the purpose for this bot.

Many of you have probably experienced something similar to this:

* Nobody has joined the gather yet.
* You join it to get things rolling.
* You go play some pubs while you wait, but you don't like the added framedrops / inputlag the idle browser gives you so you close it.
* Hours go by and you forget.
* 20 hours later you get bombarded with steam messages complaining you didn't show up and forgot to resign.

The above experience serves as a future deterrent for people to be the first to join the gather. It's not just annoying for the other players, it's extremely annoying for the forgetful individual. This slows down the entire gather community and ultimately leads to inactivity in my experience.

The bot I made is designed to:
* Remind you when gathers are about to start, giving you a chance to resign in due time.
Hopefully this will remedy the above mentioned deterrent.

* Announce when empty spots for the next gather are getting occupied - Encouraging you to join in the last minute.
This makes it much easier for people who can't put off 2 hours of their schedule to wait for gathers etc.

* Announce when the gather has started and will link you to the gather page.
This allows you to close your internet browser while you're waiting for the gather to start. (Which in my case at least, lead to substantial improvements in framerate in-game)

All of the above works without the need to have your internet browser up or install any 3rd party programs what so ever. It will also serve to notify you while you're in-game.

If you are concerned that it will spam during an official match or what ever - just use the "Block all communication" feature in steam.

Installation:

The only thing you need to do to make this work is: add this guy on your steam friendslist and you're done:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/nslgatherbot2/

Message the bot " !help " for instructions.

Possible future features include:
* Per request: Pcw/scrim organizer. (Mega) - Wether I bother making this, will depend on how many people decide to use the bot and peoples feedback.
* Bot will monitor who (by steamID) has joined the gather and will behave accordingly (i.e. message people in a less general sense as it does now).
* (Requires ENSL admin assistance) Make it possible to join a gather through the bot rather than joining through the website.

Edit oct-14th: Per request, bot now only announces if your steam status is set to Online. So you may set your self to busy or away if you'd like to be excempt from the announcements (it also messaged people who were offline, which is now fixed) - otherwise there's also the "Block All Communications".

Edit jan-17-2016: Gather announcer conditions editor:
To edit the conditions, message the bot with the command "!msgconditions [option]"

Valid options are as follows:
Online : Only announce if your personastatus on steam is set to "Online" (Default setting)
Away : Announce if your personastatus on steam is set to "Online" or "Away"
Busy : Announce if your personastatus on steam is set to "Online" or "Busy"
All : Announce if your personastatus on steam is set to anything other than "Offline"
Non : Disable gather announcing

Really nice work man. Hope you can get the support you need and get cooperating with the admins.

Very nice!
Not that i actively play but still a step onward.

awesome

I really like the idea. This was mentioned somewhere on the forums in the past but hadn't been done though. @Semi contacted us a few days ago to make some changes on the gather page and maybe, further things on the website itself. I also know he talked about a Gather Bot but that's kind of things that need a deeper discussion.

Gather isn't my skillset, I won't say anything else here but I really like the work done. I'd like you to have a talk with the involved people.

Hi,

I'm agreeably surprised when I see great people investing their time for improving the gather system. there are some great ideas on your project and it deserves to be developed for find a second youth for NS2 (ensl, gather, etc).

I encourage you to continue your effort and keeping the right way to give a positive evolution on the gather system. I suggest you to discuss about this on the ENSL slack.

FrenchKiss,

Thank you for the kind words everybody.

Please post suggestions to what you'd like to see - or perhaps more importantly what you'd like to avoid seeing in this bot!

its the best invention since human creation

Nekroing this thread to say. Bot is back online for anyone who's interested. Brand new to go with the new ENSL gather system.

Some of you who haven't removed it on your friendslist may already have noticed.

Gather activity has been quite lively recently, so now might be the time to pick up some gathers!

Cool stuff. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help make things easier for the bot

Bumping again. New feature by request.

Gather announcer conditions editor:
To edit the conditions, message the bot with the command "!msgconditions [option]"

Valid options are as follows:
Online : Only announce if your personastatus on steam is set to "Online" (Default setting)
Away : Announce if your personastatus on steam is set to "Online" or "Away"
Busy : Announce if your personastatus on steam is set to "Online" or "Busy"
All : Announce if your personastatus on steam is set to anything other than "Offline"
Non : Disable gather announcing

chris says

Cool stuff. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help make things easier for the bot

There is one thing. Maybe I'm just blind, but I can't figure out how to get the gatherserver? It doesn't look like it's in http://gathers.ensl.org/gathers/current

I'm not one for creating unnecessary state (-:

Winning server is based on aggregating voting results each time: gatherers.serverVote.reduce().sort().pop()

Need to be careful with the sort function, on tied vote counts you then sort on which has the higher ID (i.e. newer maps take precedent)

List of maps available off ensl.org api: http://www.ensl.org/api/v1/servers

Reference implementation (I guess) is here: https://github.com/cblanc/sws_gathers/blob/master/lib%2Freact%2Fhelper.jsx#L9

Thanks for using my bot guys. Apparently the friendslist limit has been reached (lol), so I have made a second bot. http://steamcommunity.com/id/nslgatherbot2/