This is a Sysop only administrative tool that has the following uses:
1) Send welcome messages to new players, that can inform them of the rules of the specific game they are in.
2) Announce the entrance of someone in the game into the daily log.
3) Send blast messages to all accounts on the server, or in a specific game, to tell your players about upcoming bangs, server outages, or other information you need to send them.
4) One instance of TWX controls all games that Sysbot is operating in.
5) Instructions are included in the zip file.

Any comments, bug discoveries, mod requests, please email me at ice9sysop@gmail.com
Release Notes:
Initial Public Release.

Full version history included in the script.

While his version of the script has been running stable on Ice9 for over 6 weeks, you are running it on your server at your own risk.

The Script can be downloaded here

I plan on releasing selected other sysop utilities I have written in the coming weeks.

A new version of sysbot has been released. This version corrects two minor bugs introduced in v1.1

1) An unitialized player (i.e. someone just joining the game, but not placed in Sector 1 yet) would hang v1.1, this has been corrected.
2) Blast messages were not necessarily sent to all games. But only games left in the cycle, after the message.txt file was put in the sysbot directory. This has been corrected.

In Thrawn's absence I am looking after our site. He had mentioned this script to me before he left and I would like to get it setup for him. If I have any issues, may I contact you for further help? I'd like to surprise him on his return.

I would be happy to help, I tried to make the directions pretty straightforward, but what is straightforward for me as the person who wrote the script, may not be straightforward for some people who have not spent WAAAAY too many hours coding it, so it would help me to know where the rough spots in the instructions are.

Here is the current setup I have on our end:

1. I have a dir with twxproxy set up. In the /twxproxy dir, I have a /sysbot directory with the dat file and messages.
2. In the /twxproxy/scripts dir is your _i9_sysbot.ts script
3. In twxproxy, I set the login script to the _i9_sysbot script and filled in the username and password (admin login). I also have the key for twxproxy set to !. So for example, Use login script is checked, the Username is SysBot, password is our admin password, script is _i9_sysbot.ts
4. I have a SysBot observer account in game A established

When I connect to twxproxy, it logs in and goes to the editor for game A and sits there. Did I miss something?

When it is sitting there, do me a favor and hit !st, to get the list of triggers that it is waiting for. I think I know what it is, ICE9 has local TEDIT PWs, the logic is supposed to work regardless, but it sounds as if it is not working that way.

Here it is:
---
Trigger dump for script: scripts\_i9_sysbot.ts

Text Triggers:
Text-Line Triggers:
Text-Out Triggers:
Delay Triggers:
Event Triggers:
0 = [:FAIL, "Connection Lost", ""]
Waiting For: "Password?"
---

Thrawn did not setup local TEDIT passwords. If the script is set for that, I know how to change it on our server to include local tedit passwords. I can change it here if need be.

I really appreciate you helping me out.

Yeah, that is what it is then. I guess the logic to work both ways didn't work as well as I thought, or I changed something since I tested it... PM me your email addy, and I can just take the part to give the PW out real quick, cause it will probably be a few days before I can sit down and fix the logic so it will work with both.

Actually I figured it out. As soon as you mentioned the local pw, I set it on our server and now the script works.

So it may be good to mention in your instructions to sysops using the script to ensure they set the global and local tedit password as the script is looking for that trigger. Also mention the password can only be 8 characters in length. Our global/local tedit pw is different from the admin one, but to new sysops they may get flustered trying to get it to input more than 8 characters.

Thrawn will be pleased that it works. Thank you for the help.

One hiccup I encountered...

I have the understanding that if no record exists it will add a record (#200) for the sysbot account. When it goes to enter the game, it needs to initialize that account. Then it needs to name it's ship. It hung there until I managed to get a misc name inputted for the ship. Now it runs great.

Can the script also include naming the ship AND use BBS name as it enters the TW2002 mode?

It should automatically name the ship... at least it has been on my server. I know for the two games I banged this weekend it worked without issue. How long did it hang for? Did you happen to notice what trigger it was waiting for? If it happens when you set it up for another game, can you tell me what trigger it is waiting for?

I can modify the script, so it reads from a file, such as "shipname.dat" and use whatever is in the file for that ship name. That way a sysop can change it without having to hunt through the file.

There are still large parts of the code that are a bit clunky, but work. I will take a look at streamlining the ship creation code, see if I can find what is causing it to hang, as well as have it read in from that file, or use a default name if that file is unavailable. Will try to get to that this weekend.

I found my issue. It was not the script, but something I had running that I forgot to terminate. My apologies.

Ran it on two more games and it worked fine.

OK cool. Will try still try to get the next version with the shipname.dat file out this weekend. I never really thought someone would care what the ship name was, because most of the time sysbot is on and off for less than a second, but it is easy enough to do.

Please don't feel the need to do it for us. It is an easy walkthrough to configure:

1. Log into game editor (tedit) and create the record for the script. In our case, we used Sysbot. Make sure you add to record #200; set as Observer. Be certain the info used (username/password) matches the global/local password in TWGS and in TWXProxy.
2. Log into the game as the Sysbot and initialize account, name the ship.
3. Log out
4. Set TWXProxy to use login script and use the _i9_sysbot.ts script.

It worked well on the test server we use here. Now I am going to put in place on our main system before Thrawn returns.

So just so I understand, did Sysbot generate itself properly or not? If it is not, could you please provide what trigger it is hanging on, and what the prompt is that it is hanging on? It is working fine on ICE, but if there is something where it is not working, I would want to know.

Thanks.