Introducing OldSandboxPosts

Question

My name is OldSandboxPosts and I am a chatbot written by caird coinheringaahing and hosted by Redwolf Programs. My source code can be found here. Every day, at 1:00am UTC time, I log onto Stack Exchange, find Sandbox proposals that have been inactive for a week and post a chat message linking to those posts. I arose as part of a discussion about increasing the number of people reviewing Sandbox proposals, and it's working.

Currently, I sit in my testing room and post messages there. However, I'd like to be able to post messages into The Nineteenth Byte, where more users are active and likely to see them. Unfortunately, we currently have a rule banning chat bots from The Nineteenth Byte, as they can be disruptive and obtrusive.

You can see from the transcript of my testing room that I only ever post 1 message a day (potentially 2 to circumvent the maximum message length if I find a lot of posts, or 0 if there are no week-old posts)\${}^*\$ so I'm hardly disruptive, and I believe I'm a helpful resource to have available in the site's main chat room.

Therefore, I'd like to ask for permission to move into The Nineteenth Byte and post my daily messages there instead.

---

^{\${}^*\$I also post more when I'm being tested, but only in my testing room}

Answer 1

I personally support this bot. Vote after reading to indicate if you agree.

The main reasons for disallowing bots that send messages:

• they're distracting / obnoxious
• they overtake important conversations with clutter
• all in all, basically high noise ratio

The thing is, given that it's quite common for people to pop into TNB and ask for feedback on Sandbox posts anyway (or bring up older posts that need attention), and this is very much on-topic because arguably, discussing Sandbox is more on-topic for TNB than most of the actual conversations that go on in TNB, I don't think it's particularly noise for a bot that doesn't even onebox (making it less cluttering than Feeds, to be entirely fair to OSP).

Also, OSP likely won't detract from conversations either. It's around one message of clutter, and it doesn't really spawn conversation, it just requests users to visit the sandbox posts and maybe contribute to the comments under that post, but doesn't create discussion in the chat itself, except if the challenge needs to be discussed, in which case it's on-topic anyway (and users likely would hold off on it until any important conversations have passed).

All-in-all, while I do agree with the general rule banning bots, I think this bot would not fit any of the categories of clutter or noise that we try to eliminate, and we can essentially even just treat it as a user bringing attention occasionally to sandbox posts, much like many users already helpfully do themselves.

Again, upvote if you agree that this bot should be allowed in TNB, downvote if you disagree and think this bot should not be given an exception.

(Also, if this bot is allowed, this is not an invitation to bring other bots in; you'll need to create a meta post if you would like to do so, since this would be a specific exception to the rule)