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What does everyone think of bots on Beehaw?
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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I think bots can have a place, but I prefer ones that have to be intentionally invoked. I'm thinking of ones like MTGCardFetcher on the Magic the Gathering subreddit, which would post links to the card on Scryfall if you formatted the card name in double brackets in your comment.
In my opinion, such bots indicate more of a need for some kind of easy "pipe" feature to integrate tools to transform a post before publishing, so that all of the tweaks can be done within the post instead of as a bot reply. For example, there could be a "MTG-ify" button that takes the text in the input box, turns the double bracketed names into CommonMark links, and then puts the modified text back into the input box.
Yeah I don't disagree at all that it would be ideal if some of this kind of functionality could be built into the platform, but obviously that didn't really happen at Reddit - which is why there were so many similar bots to allow subreddits to create extended functionality - and Lemmy is still new enough that contributors are still trying to fix major issues and get basic functionality working properly. In the meantime bots could fill some gaps, although I lean toward using them very sparingly.