Shutting Down The Twitter Bot
Sad news today, as Twitter has announced that API access will no longer be free startong on Feb 9, 2023. Sadly this means the end of the bot’s run on Twitter which started in Feb 2017. Almost 5 years! It was fun while it lasted. The Twitter bot will run until it can’t.
Migrating to Mastodon
That was the bad news. The good news is that a version of the trivia bot is already up and running on the fediverse/Mastodon networks. You can follow the bot at https://botsin.space/@triviastorm. It follows the same rules and uses the same question set: a new question is asked every hour, and the bot will collect and score correct responses after an hour. Additionally, the bot supports hiding your responses behind Mastodon’s spoiler/content warning feature!
New Feature: Reporting
Unfortunately, the question pool still includes a lot of old questions from quizzes and such that were never encoded properly for use in a trivia bot, so some questions may still have some issues. Back on Twitter you could complain to the bot directly and I would just check the bot’s notifications every so often, and as needed I would correct questions and re-check questions. This was a very human process which meant some complaints would fall by the wayside or be forgotten.
For the Mastodon migration, I’ve added a new feature where you can reply to the bot with a certain format to report problems with a question. This sends the reports directly to me via an RSS feed that I follow, hopefully making it easier for me to see reports. The Mastodon triviabot includes in it’s summary posts the instructions for reporting a question: "If you think there was a problem with this question, please reply to this post with "!report <details>", thanks!"
(I had already done the work to update the Twitter bot to include this feature as well, but with the impending API shutdown, it no longer seems necessary.)
Blog Update
This is only the second post on this blog, and I’m still playing around with the theme. What do you think? (I am keeping those old-timey Share buttons at the bottom of each post for now.)
Support Us
If you enjoy the use of the trivia bot(s), consider leaving me a tip!