Project Ban Hammer

[BerkeleyTrue]

Project Ban Hammer

In order to facilitate troll extermination we need a system to promote campers to admins in Gitter without giving them write access on Free Code Camp org. We can do this. We have the power.

This will come in three parts.

• Promote CamperBot's github user to an owner on FCC org.
• Create a command where camperbot will enter the text /ban @<someUser> in all our main chat rooms.
• Checks if the user giving the command is a FCC admin (This will be a list on the server that will not be tracked here on the Repo)

[SaintPeter]

I propose !ban rather than /ban, so it doesn't conflict with the actual /ban command.

[BerkeleyTrue]

The command can be what ever we want. We can even do 'fluffy foo @`

[SaintPeter]

We can even do fluffy foo @<username>

I fully endorse and insist on this command name.

[joepurdy]

I humbly submit bye felicia @<username> as a candidate for the ban command

[SaintPeter]

Project Ban Hammer, Test 0001 Naive implementation, have the bot "say" /ban @username appears to have failed. The bot literally says it, no effect on test subject.

Looking through the docs it's not clear the a bot even can issue commands as distinct from messages.

[BerkeleyTrue]

The bot cannot ban people until it has write access.

[SaintPeter]

I have my personal bot, "SaintBot", set up with a room created by that account. I was able to manually ban a user with that account, but the bot was not able to with the same account.

[BerkeleyTrue]

Dang. Does the text show up in the general chat?

[SaintPeter]

Yes: :point_up: November 22, 2015 6:20 PM

Note that although the activity shows a ban and unban in that room, that was me confirming that I as "SaintBot" could manually ban/unban them.

@abhisekp had a conversation with @madlittlemods and he indicated he didn't know if it would work or not and asked us to file an issue: gitterHQ/gitter#989

So, at least for the moment, this appears to be a dead letter.

[BerkeleyTrue]

Bummer.

[ltegman]

According to a recent response on that issue this functionality should be possible through a previously undocumented API endpoint.

[abhisekp]

@ltegman yes. It's possible using the following API command endpoints

Ban

POST /rooms/:roomId/bans
{"username":"trolluser"}

Unban

DELETE /rooms/:roomId/bans/:username

[sludge256]

Since we have a repo for Gitter mods and the recent ability to add mods directly through Gitter (even though we've decided to stick with using the repo) would we consider this issue to be resolved and no longer necessary?

Having camperbot issue the ban also raises some issues with logging and resolving ban cases.

[BerkeleyTrue]

The only thing we can't do now that we could program camperbot to do would be to programmatically ban a user from all our rooms