Inquisitor Play Testing

The day has come, and Inquisitor is ready for real-life play testing with our dedicated #Trivia members!! The last few months of development have produced a range of emotions and feelings, especially in the beginning, but we are proud of where we ended up today. We've worked tirelessly to ensure Inquisitor keeps the game fun and exciting for all of our players, while opening up new opportunities and ensuring everything you know and love about our current bot carries through.

We'd like to give an additional shoutout and heartfelt THANK YOU to our dedicated pre-release testers, who joined us over on Inquisitor's IRC network and saw the bot through its early development cycles and many weird behaviors. Those people are scroll, puellapurpura, and MurphysLaw. Without their assistance and feedback, Inquisitor could not have become what it is today.

TL;DR, Start and stop the game with !trivia, continue to report questions with !report, do not expect BP for these test rounds.

Now onto the important parts!

• BP will not be paid out for any testing rounds at this time. This may change in the future, but at least for the first couple weeks there will be no payout. This allows us to monitor the gameplay and make adjustments as needed before we start being able to assign BP values.

• Points and statistics for ALL test rounds will not be combined with existing bot scores. For the same reason as not paying out BP, these are test rounds and do not necessarily reflect final point values we'll be using during live gameplay. Once we are officially ready to move to the new bot, any scores on the old bot will be moved over.

• Both bots will be active in the channel during testing. Inquisitor's commands are the same as what you're used to, except for being invoked with ! instead of - or @. This means !trivia, !stats, !topday, !report, etc. The only exception to this is the -notify command, as this functionality has not been ported to Inquisitor yet.

• This is beta software, and bugs are to be expected. We know things are not going to work the way they're supposed to 100% of the time. We encourage you to try and break the bot (within reason!) Finding issues now makes everything better for when we make our official release. Please report any bugs with the !bug command - these details will go directly into our development flow for future improvements. Please continue to report any question issues as well, this validates our question reporting and fix process works as expected. Remember to use !report and not -report, otherwise you may end up reporting the wrong question on the wrong bot. An important note: do not maliciously attempt to bypass permission checks or abuse any bot functions. Simple testing to see if you can run a command you shouldn't be allowed to is fine, spamming the bot with the same command 10 times in 5 seconds is not.

• Most importantly, HAVE FUN! We want our members to continue to have an enjoyable time in the channel, just like they always have. Participating in the beta testing is completely optional, and you always have the option to return to our existing bot at any time.

Full documentation for Inquisitor is available by clicking here. Suggestions are encouraged, and you can create an account on our Git and suggest edits to any pages by clicking the paper and pencil icon near the top of the page.

A quick note from MurphysLaw: I want to take a moment to recognize rb14060, who may not have highlighted his own contributions because he likely sees them as obvious—but they absolutely deserve acknowledgment. While I’ve been able to offer feedback and help shape ideas, I don’t have coding experience (as many of you in #Trivia already know). The real work, dedication, and technical expertise behind this project belong to rb14060.

Having played bot trivia across the internet for decades, I can honestly say there has never been a better trivia bot than what’s been created here—primarily for all of you to enjoy. We now have the most feature-rich trivia bot on IRC or any chat platform, and as development continues, you can only expect even more cool things to come— and it's all because of him. 

Because of that, I encourage everyone to take a moment to share your appreciation. When you see rb14060 active in the channel, please offer a few words of thanks and encouragement. This wouldn’t have been possible without him.