Meet the Linux Cafe Bots

August 10, 2019

Cafétera

Cafétera looks like a single bot from a first glance, but in reality, it's actually multiple bots.

The reason why we use multiple bots instead of a single bot is because one bot cannot be the best at everything. The saying goes: “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

So, here are the bots bringing work to you in the background.

Unnamed Bot

This bot provides most of the Linux Cafe-specific functionality. They'll run bash commands, search distro packages, manage profiles and screenshots, and some other things. You can find their source at linux-cafe/unnamed-bot on GitHub.

Red

Red, they're a pretty cool bot. They have a very extensible system, but the only extension they have active is one to provide swingin' tunes in the nightclub. Their source is at Cog-Creators/Red-DiscordBot on GitHub.

Discord.RSS

Discord.RSS is a busybee. They don't look up from their job of sifting through hundreds of RSS posts a day (mostly Arch Linux package updates). They keep on posting. You'll find their source here at synzen/Discord.RSS on GitHub.

YAGPDB

YAGPDB loves helping the moderation team. It's all they really do. They'll keep the modlog working to keep that transparency at 100%. They also offer rolemenus, but that's super trivial for them compared to their job of moderation. Their source is at jonas747/yagpdb on GitHub.

Maiden Voyage

Maiden Voyage spends most of her time carrying messages between different services. She allows people to communicate on a fully free platform with a community backed by fully free bots. She's an instance of 42wim/matterbridge on GitHub.

Why These Bots?

These bots are 100% open source. And 100% means 100%. They also did whatever job they were supposed to the best.

Why Not These Bots?

Valkyrja. I personally think YAGPDB has nicer configuration for a lot of things Valkyrja does. Mostly open source, but Valkyrja.secure is kept in a private repository, and it contains bot functions such as antispam. Not 100% open source. Additionally, the licenses can be somewhat conflicting. The website identifies itself as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, while the README for the website identifies the website as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, while the LICENSE file says the website is MIT. Pick a license, yo.
Mee6. Modern version is not open source, and barebones in useful features. Also the levels thing is annoying and a huge mistake. It serves no useful function to chat other than to get people to post messages to post messages rather than to actually chat.
Blargbot. BBTAG is what would happen if someone learned Lisp in a day, got lobotomized, and tried to recreate Lisp from scratch. Code is often unreadable and it cannot do many things.