Poetry-on-demand

There are a number of triggers that are available for automatic reading of poetry, and other random thing, in the channel. They are meant to be used when there is not much going on in the channel, or just to provide a piece for discussion. Please don't flood the channel by repeatedly hitting the triggers, with no pause for discussion or other people to read between the poems. The triggers are provided by the "Japi" user, so they are only available if that user is in the channel, and the script is loaded and running. The triggers that are provided are:

For the poem-reading triggers, you can do some basic searches to find a semi-specific poem.

All searches are case-insensitive, and every space is used in the search (if there is a space between the colon and the search word, then it will search for a space, followed by the word). Wild cards are only supported on the regular expression search, and you can't combine different search types ("!poem w:spring t:love" is not valid). Any search can be reversed by using ! in front of it, as in "!poem !w:hate" would read a poem that does not contain "hate".

The regular expression searches are done using PCRE, and are case insensitive, with . matching newlines (as in, they are compiled using "PCRE_CASELESS | PCRE_DOTALL" for options, and then are studied for better performance). These expressions are said to be "Perl Compatable", meaning any RE Perl can handle, this should be able to handle as well. Detailed documentation can be found here, at the Perl Documentation site. Performance of the expressions can be quite bad, if you have a complex serach with many *s in it, with it possible that some searches could take in the excess of 15 minutes to complete. The !poem triggers will be blocked while the initial request is being completed.

If you would like to submit poems or prompts to be included in any of the triggers, please email them as .txt files, or a zip of .txt files, to poems@undernet-poetry.com You may submit your own poems (which will be added to the !channelpoems trigger), or poems of established poets, with proper credit given to the author. Prompts don't need to be .txt files, just include a big list of them in an email, and I will add them.

The !stats trigger dumps a table of channel activity statistics, measured in lines of text to the channel per hour, posted by all users. Peak and low statistics are calculated also, based on a sliding hour window. Also output are the "Adjusted" lines per hour, which does not include the output from any of the !poem, !channelpoem, !haiku, etc commands in the count. This might give a better indication of true channel activity. So, if you think the channel is dead, give !stats a poke, and you can see how the day compares with the averages.

Instead of !stats, you can use !graph to display a graph of the daily activity. The graph is of the lines read per day. In order for the graph to look decent, you need to be using a fixed width (non-proportional) font (this type of font is strongely recommended for #poetry anyway, because people sometimes do fancy things with spacing). The graph is slightly confusing to read, but I don't know a better way to format it. On the vertical, there is a scale of how many lines total for a given day. On the horizontal, is the labels for days, going back 60 days. For each day, there is a vertical bar, indicating how many lines were read to the channel for that day. On the bottom part of the bar will be "*"s to indicate adjusted lines, and then above that, "o" indicate unadjusted lines, in addition to the adjusted. See the definitions for adjusted/unadjusted in the !stats trigger discription above. If you know a better way to format this output, let me know, but keep in mind that it needs to rendered using simple ASCII characters, in a limited amount of space, without icky colors.

Poetry backups

Worried about losing a lifetime of work? Don't know where to keep backups that won't be destroyed/lost in case of fire/theft? Then take a look at Japi's Backup services.