Feedback on user submit (Now Playing preview DM)

[Cephian]

It would be nice if Busty could DM the user a preview of what their song will look like on the "Now Playing" message upon submit, since some people might be unsure they're doing it right especially for more exotic (but space efficient!) formats like ogg or opus. It would also serve the dual purpose of a "confirmation", though ofc even if busty is not running when a song is submitted she will still play it during bust time.

This is the first feature we'd implement which would require Busty to be "always on" instead of just on during the sync. Because of this, there should be some sort of flag or environment config allowing you to turn off all "always on" features.

[anoadragon453]

Because of this, there should be some sort of flag or environment config allowing you to turn off all "always on" features.

What would be the use case for disabling this? If you're not going to have the bot running outside of busts, then this feature won't work anyways?

[Cephian]

What would be the use case for disabling this? If you're not going to have the bot running outside of busts, then this feature won't work anyways?

That's true if you time it perfectly, but it also makes it so that if you want consistent behavior you CAN'T run Busty outside of the bust. For ex, you might want to turn busty on 15 minutes before the bust or so, but then only people submitting during that time will get DMs. Same with not turning off the bot quickly enough if people submit directly after the bust (which did happen last time!) or turning it on to test !list or something. Imo it's potentially confusing to only sometimes get confirmation, it makes it feel like the times with no confirmation were not "counted properly".

Since adding the ability to turn it off is probably no more than a single line for reading the config variable and a single line for the if statement to check it, I think it's worth adding

[anoadragon453]

Ah, I see the reasoning now. I didn't twig that one may become confused if they didn't receive a DM from the bot after submitting.

I'm still not sure how this is different from taking the bot down though. If you do that, busty also won't respond to submission.

I think having to disable/enable options at specified times is a bit of a bad smell. What if I'm away from internet for a week?

Perhaps instead, we could make a design tweak to prevent the confusing situation from happening. With the current solution, you may run into issues where:

• You find out and need to correct mistakes by publicly deleting/re-uploading submissions, which is a bit awkward.
• If the bot does happen to be unexpectedly down, you'd have to delete/re-submit your track in the submission channel in order to get a preview.
• We have to create an environment variable / command to specify the new submission channel each time.

What do you think about instead just allowing people to DM the bot a track, and the bot would respond with a Now Playing preview?

[Cephian]

I realized that because of the whole having to specify a submission channel thing adding an extra config option to disable this feature is actually somewhat pointless in the first place, since you could presumably just not specify a submit channel for no previews. If we were to do it the submit-channel way we could just have an env variable config for channel name regex which defaults to something like bustys-mailbox. That way there's no need to reboot the bot after every bust.

The DM option is still cool though, I like it since it's less public. I think the way I'd prefer is:

• Add env variable config option BUSTY_MONITOR_CHANNELS_REGEX (default bustys-mailbox)
• A channel is "monitored" if it matches the regex, or if it is a DM channel
• Whenever a media attached message is sent in a monitored channel, busty DMs the user a preview of the "Now Playing" message

Part of why I like the message-on-submit is that we can also use that message to remind ppl of features busty has like cover art or tag reading if they didnt read the info channel carefully.

[anoadragon453]

Part of why I like the message-on-submit is that we can also use that message to remind ppl of features busty has like cover art or tag reading if they didnt read the info channel carefully.

Right, that's a very good point. I'm starting to see how this could work now...

On submission, it could DM the user with a series of messages like:

Thanks for submitting to busty's. Here's what your submission will look like during the upcoming bust:

Now playing: ...

Don't forget, you can:

• Edit your audio file's tag to include an artist, song name or cover art and it'll be shown to people when your song plays. You can use a program like https://kid3.kde.org to add tags to your file.
• Include a message with your submission, and it'll appear under a "More info" banner when your song comes on.
• ...

If you would like to try uploading a new file, just DM it here and a new preview will be generated.

Upon submitting an audio file, the bot would reply with the same thing, just without the "thanks for submitting to busty's" intro.