So… I’m an IRC operator on a fairly well traffic-ed channel (#twokinds on Nightstar, if you care – we’ve been averaging 55 people or so fairly consistently lately), and one of the things which I have to deal with is general malignants, which is generally done by kicking and banning them.
Now, I’m not the only op around, but there have been periods where all the ops disappear, and a few days ago there was an attack that happened to coincide with one of those periods.
I know this because a) people told me when I returned from being AFK, but also because b) I’ve got a supybot living in the channel providing a bunch of services to the channel. Now, because that bot is authenticated as me to NickServ, it also gets op privileges. So, it seemed time had come for me to implement one of the ideas which I’ve had – vote powered kickbanning, where trusted users can vote to kick and ban a miscreant.
So that covered steps 1-3 of my dev process. Next step was planning it out. And I really do use paper to plan:
Conceptualizing the flow of a plugin
Step 5 involved digging into the guts of existing supybot plugins – I’ll be pulling stuff from the Channel plugins to write it, so that was a starting point. The code is fairly convoluted, and I still don’t understand all of it, but I think I’ve got enough for the basics of the plugin to work.
Now it’s just to actually write the blasted thing, and get it working. 😛