MetaBot in #ubuntu-offtopic

[Lorenzo J. Lucchini]

As you might know, I've run a MetaBot in #ubuntu for some time.
MetaBot is a naive Bayes classifier that determines which messages are support 
questions and which ones aren't, and if they are questions, which "category" 
they belong to.

Now that the bot is mature, I intend to expand its scope to cover detection 
of "trollish" behavior in #ubuntu-offtopic, by implementing it inside 
WatchBot.

The principle will be exactly the same: the bot will scan messages and apply 
the Bayes algorithm to them - the difference is that, if a message is 
categorized as "trolling", ops are alerted, and the offender is automatically 
muted for 5 minutes.

I think this is a "safe" behavior, as a 5-minutes mute is unlikely to cause 
any harm even in the case of a false positive.

The bot will only permanently ban offenders if more than 4 "trolling" messages 
get sent within a 30 minutes timeframe, and will still alert the operators if 
that happens so that they can review the events.

I hope this will be useful and make #ubuntu-offtopic a more pleasing 
experience.


by LjL
ljl at ubuntu.com
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