What should WolfBot do for us?

Question

Right now, I'm busy making a chatbot for AskUbuntu known as WolfBot (you can play with it over in the testing room). You may remember the bot from such hits as Where should WolfBot live?, and everyone's favorite, "WolfBot crashed (again)!"

However, I've hit a roadblock with development inasmuch as I can't decide what to do with it anymore.

Therefore, I thought it to be appropriate to turn to the all-knowing community for which this bot was made to assist.

What should I add to WolfBot next?

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In order to keep some semblance of order, I ask that each feature request for the bot be made into its own Community Wiki answer, such that others can improve and flesh out the concept. If numerous features are related, please post them as one giant post. If a post gets enough positive feedback (or I like it), I'll try to implement it into the bot as best as possible.

Ideally, I'd prefer to only get serious and actually useful ideas, but I won't automatically turn away silly/comedic ideas.

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Update 10/13: For now, the bot is offline while I perform some maintenance/upgrades to allow the bot to do cool things, like work in multiple rooms. I don't know when the bot is coming back, but rest assured that it will be online again soon.

Answer 1

Developer Note: This is status-completed as per Post Shortcuts. If these two features are different, or people feel that this is not implemented in the same spirit as intended in this feature request, you may remove this text and ping me in the Comments or any chatroom.

Use it to point to canonical answers to help users find good answers and/or write better questions. For instance wireless? and wifi? -> My wireless/WiFi connection does not work. What information is needed to diagnose the issue? I'm certain there are many more examples but this one comes to mind as an area of possible high impact.

Answer 2

Developer note: status-planned, needs addition for tag checking in addition to just posts, but this shouldn't be hard.

I think it would be very useful if it could detect EOL questions, as most questions that mention EOL versions are off topic (with a few exceptions) the bot should have a high success rate finding them.

Use key words like

• 12.10
• 13.04
• 13.10
• Quantal Quetzal
• Raring Ringtail
• Saucy Salamander

As these can be hard to spot, it would help a lot to have them presented to us.

Here is a full list of EOL versions.

Answer 3

Post Shortcuts - status-completed

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Have an ability to save and get shortcuts to special/important links, like: !!/s google.

This could be used to store canonical questions that need to be easily referenced in such a way that it can be found easily (say, the canonical question for no Unity).

Moderators and room owners should ideally be able to add and remove shortcuts at will.

Answer 4

Keyword Flagging status-completed

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The bot should have a feature that will monitor incoming questions and check each post for certain "keywords" as defined by a moderator or bot admin. If such a phrase is found, raise the post by way of a non-intrusive message in chat so that it can be looked at.

This could be used to watch for off-topic posts (like those about Kali or Mint) or posts of a certain caliber. This system should also include a "whitelist", which will always allow the post through, regardless of any blacklisted phrases.

Bot Dev Note: This feature is currently in the bot (initially for testing purposes), but has generated a lot of controversy in chat and elsewhere. This post exists, like the shortcut post, to see the worth of such a feature, and if it's a general good idea or a bad idea.

Answer 5

Turn it off.

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Why do we even need a chatbot? We've been fine without it, and I see no reason to start using one now.

Note: As of the next update to the bot, if this post has a total score of +3 or more, the bot will be silenced/muted until the score drops down to 0 or less. A score check of this post will take place every 12 hours. The testing room will not have this restriction.

Answer 6

Use it as an interactive guide for questions that are asked frequently.

(I.e. how to install Ubuntu, how to dual boot, what are the advantages of Ubuntu)

I'm thinking the bot would respond to questions like "how do I install ubuntu?" It would then give a generic answer and direct the user to specific questions.

Answer 7

Filtering. That one word answer hold so much in it, but in general, bots such as Smokey have been utilized at a rate that can be described as a parabola. At the beginning, the bot seemed like it was revolutionary, but as time went on, and the way questions needed to be filtered changed.

The main use that I have seen of Smokey nowadays is finding "mostly non-latin bodies," but there's so much more your bot (knowing your level of intelligence) could do!

One feature I would love to see (if possible) is auto-tag editing. When a user asks a question about (for example) nVidia drivers, keywords such as "nvidia" will appear often in the question, however in the tags of the question, the user may not include the nvidia tag.

If the bot could see this by reading the list of current tags, WolfBot could either point out when this occurs, or again if possible automatically add the tags, and submit the question as a suggested edit.

Note:

• WolfBot does currently have a "keyword system", which I could see almost perfectly implemented into this system.

Obviously I'm not the designer, and I don't want to discuss this all here, but the word "nvidia" could come up by itself in a question, so testing against a list of keywords just once would not work, and the exact dimensions and kinks would need to be worked out, but I know you can do it!

Small things like this can be hard to do, and may not seem like they provide that much help to the community, but I have high hopes that WolfBot will turn into something great!

Answer 8

Going off of David Cole's answer about the bot looking for miss tagged questions, this could work IMO if it just presented them to a room for editing, <2k users could use it to easily find things to edit.

I think it could go one step further and look for common spelling and grammatical errors, things like Ubunto come to mind and text speak like U and Y and WTF could be sings of a post that needs an edit.

I am sure something like this would take time and testing to get right but I think the idea of presenting posts to be edited to users looking to edit could be a great thing but no kind of automation should be used to edit posts, it will be a liability.

Answer 9

Watch for NAAs from New Users

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Add a check to WolfBot that scans all incoming answers. If a user has less than a set threshold of reputation (say, 5 rep), and the bot detects a question mark or a set of keywords in the answer to suggest that it in fact is not an answer, post a message in chat.

This check does not need to be configurable from chat, but it should be able to be enabled/disabled as needed.

Answer 10

IMAGE SEARCH

You could use your bot to do an image search by searching for a photo in Bing/Google images and posting the top hit.