AugustinAndroid v2 Public Release

[August]

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| ABOUT | CREATIVE USES | OPEN SOURCE | NSNEXUS | NSVERIFY | PRIVACY | STATISTICS |

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Information

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It is finally here: the AugustinAndroid NS-based Discord bot! This project is under active development.

Invite the bot to your server
Join the support server
Technical thread

Bot tag: @AugustinAndroid v2#1723
Bot ID: 459227558274138133
Author tag: @August#4079
Author ID: 213088304537534464

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FAQ & Features

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Why should I invite this bot to my server?

Because this is the only NS-based bot you will ever need. For one, it has some marquee features that you cannot find anywhere else. It also has the standard set of tools that any good server needs, but fully-integrated and improved. It is powerful, flexible, and if it were any smarter, it would take your day job so you could play NS full-time. Not that you would. Let me elaborate a bit: Anyone can set up a few crude functions with Dyno. Almost anyone can download Red, stick it on some cheap hardware, find a couple cogs online, and call it a "custom bot." That is not what you are looking at here. AugustinAndroid v2 (AAbot for short) is the first-ever complete and publicly-available Discord bot created exclusively for this game, and it requires no technical expertise to use. Read on!

What can this bot do?

You mean, what can it not do? The full documentation is too long to include here, but the >help command provides information on all available commands. Notable features include:

1. NSVerify. This one is the crown jewel, the most important of the bot's onboard systems. In a nutshell, NSV ties a player's Discord account to their nation(s). With its database of nation records, it automatically assigns Discord roles to unverified accounts, region residents, organization members, visitors, and CTE players, depending on your server's settings. For maximum security, unverified accounts can be prevented from seeing your public channels and memberlist. Residency and CTE status, along with the corresponding roles, are updated daily. The more servers the bot runs on, the easier NSV will be to use, because many users will be pre-verified from other servers when they enter a new one. Rejoin a server you left previously, and you will not have to re-verify. (Relax, spies and R/Ders: privacy is important to us too. The bot will never leak your identity on one server to another server, and you can remove your identity from the database at any time.)
2. NSNexus. This is a powerful feature that links all Discord servers that operate any edition of the bot, allowing for easy and seamless inter-server communication between their members. Servers can connect to any or all of the following: the global news stream, which permits official updates from regions and organizations; the global chat stream, which permits general chatter; and embassies, which are two-way portals between a pair of servers.
3. Join/leave/ban messages. Technically this is part of NSV, but it is worth mentioning separately. If you have ever wondered about the mysterious @invalid-user who just left your server, or found the built-in join notification inadequate, this is for you. Sure, other bots offer join/leave messages... but not like this.
4. Power User tools. This group contains everything you want to give your trusted officials, but keep out of reach of ordinary players. That means command scheduling, DM alerts, polls/surveys, and a lot more. One of Discord's more frustrating limitations is that roles can be @mentioned by anyone or no one, with no settings in between. With AAbot, Power Users and above can ping roles that are not set to mentionable.
5. Moderation tools. All the usual warn/kick/ban commands are here, plus a few other handy features. The mod system is tied to the same user database as NSV, simplifying the backend and enabling server moderators to more effectively monitor users. Trying to check someone's warning record, but they keep changing their Discord username? Just enter their nation name instead.
6. Administration tools. Sometimes the power of a Discord admin role is not enough for you, and you feel the need to benevolently address everyone with a certain role via DM, or just kick everyone with that role out of the server. Mass Actions let you handle a batch of users or roles in a single command. You can also automate admin actions by placing commands on a schedule. For example, a particular channel could be automatically opened on Saturdays only and hidden the rest of the week.
7. Backups and logging. Take a snapshot of your server with the bot, or run backups on a schedule. If server is destroyed by a rogue bot or admin, the bot can recover everything (except messages) with a single command. Then, do yourself a favor and ditch Carl or Mee6, because the bot can log edits, deletions, channel/role creations/deletions, and all other server events.
8. NationStates data. Request real-time information about a nation, a region, the world, or the WA. The >swap command, which shows you a list of nations you have not endorsed, is especially popular. The bot can even provide aggregate census and activity data for individual regions, combinations of regions, or the entire world, in graphs or raw CSV format.
9. General-purpose commands. This one is a catch-all: "general-purpose" refers to reminders, user profiles, a random number generator, and more.
10. Developer support. A support ticket command allows servers to report issues as they arise, and I will personally troubleshoot them as fast as possible. In addition, all users have access to commands showing the ping response, uptime percentage, server information, and bot documentation.

Can this bot steal my nation?

No. The verification feature uses the NS API, with token authentication. It is not possible for a third party to impersonate you or steal your nation using this system.

Can it spy on my conversations or damage my server?

Yes, just like any other bot. You use this software at your own risk, but the risk is minimal. The number of servers the bot has destroyed is actually in the negatives--its backup system can be used to recover a server even from total erasure by a rogue admin or bot.

Due to the quantity and scope of all the complicated features on board, the bot does require the Administrator permission to function. However, the owner of each Discord server, and any administrators they designate, will be the only people controlling this bot on their own server. I am the only person with host/database access, and I promise unconditionally that I will not use it for malicious purposes.

As a side note, it should go without saying that it is a bad idea to send sensitive information to a Discord user (human or bot) that you do not control or know personally. I often read the bot's private messages for troubleshooting purposes. It never asks for anything sensitive, so do not send it!

Why should I trust you?

1. The NS bot alone is running on hundreds of servers with thousands of unique users. If you include the non-NS version, there are over 160k unique users across all servers. It has been public for over a year, and running on beta-test servers for nine months before that. Not once has the bot kicked someone it should not have kicked, deleted content it should not have deleted, revealed information it should not have revealed, or otherwise been the cause of a security incident.
2. I retired from NS in March 2019. Up to that point, I had only worked for myself in my own organization. After that point, I have had no political ambitions at all.
3. I have over a decade of clean history and a Commendation, for whatever that is worth.
4. I am an engineer who writes code as a hobby, not a twelve-year-old troll. The only benefit I receive from hosting this bot is the satisfaction of seeing it used.

Is it legal by NS rules?

100%. An internal rate-limiter keeps the bot well under the 100/min ceiling for API calls. Our quota of over 130k calls per day should be more than sufficient, even when distributed across a large number of servers. Much of the heavy lifting is done by the daily dumps anyway.

Can you add a feature that posts memes whenever I @ my friend???

That exists already! They are called aliases and triggers, and you can make them do all sorts of things. The bot is highly flexible, and the creative potential is endless.

If you have a suggestion for a new feature, please post it in this thread. If you send me a telegram or Discord DM, it may get lost. I will consider all reasonable suggestions for features that would benefit most or all servers using this bot. I am not likely to custom-build something for a single server, because this has backfired in the past and cost me significant time and effort.

I am a nerd. Can I get more details?

Absolutely. The program is written in Python 3.8, with user and configuration data stored in an instance of MongoDB. Everything is hosted on my local server, which is on a UPS and has 99.9% uptime. The underlying library is discord.py 1.4. Other than that library and a small handful of dependencies, everything under the hood is original. If you have any questions, concerns, or curiosities over the way it works, I am very happy to discuss the details with you.

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[DiRito-Opolis]

Glad to see that other people will finally be able to use this bot. I can attest that it is a really helpful tool for NS. And, as usual, awesome stuff, August.

[Tulov]

Glad to see that other people will finally be able to use this bot. I can attest that it is a really helpful tool for NS. And, as usual, awesome stuff, August.

Everything DiRIto said, but with extra emphasis on the "really helpful tool" part. AugustinAndroid is to die for.

[Queen Yuno]

best bot in existance

[The Noble Thatcherites]

Glad to see that other people will finally be able to use this bot. I can attest that it is a really helpful tool for NS. And, as usual, awesome stuff, August.

Ditto

[August]

Thanks for the support!

Also, try to avoid running the server setup process several times at once. This will happen if you use the >setup command while setup is ongoing, if you try to set up multiple servers simultaneously, or if you have the bot join and leave your server multiple times in short succession. The bot can handle it, but it will probably be confusing to you and result in unexpected behavior.

This kept happening, so I blocked it. The bot no longer allows a single person to run the setup multiple times in parallel. A number of stability improvements, bug fixes, and minor features have also gone live since this release.

In the week or so that the Moose has been publicly available, we have added ~300 unique users and tripled the server count. I encourage server owners to give this a try, and join the support server if you have questions or want to try the features out first.

[August]

Updated the OP.

We now have nearly 2600 verified nations in the database, and servers using the bot have nearly 2000 combined unique members. Think about it, offsite admins: thousands of players who could be walking into your region's Discord server pre-identified, verified, roles all ready to go. What a time to be alive.

Since the last post here, I have written literally hundreds of feature updates and bug fixes. Development continues every day, and the code recently broke 10k lines. Uptime is steady at ~99.9%. I would like to release some complete documentation in dispatch form in the near future, but writing documentation is awful and it might take a while. For now, the >help command and the NSV dispatch cover almost everything.

More good stuff coming soon!

[Marxist Germany]

This is great!

[August]

The help menu just received a big update, so if you are running AAbot on your server, check it out! The update includes a lot of new commands that were previously in place but undocumented, as well as formatting, layout, and ease-of-use improvements. New features and tweaks continue to be added all the time.

Meanwhile, the bots have been busy! Since September, the lively, 300-person NS Leaders server has been fully automated by Custom v2. More recently, Generic v2 powered the second iteration of Caer Sidi's UCR Con, a major gameplay event with well over 300 attendees hosted on another server. Thanks in part to these, we reached a peak of 3400 all-time verified nations and 2500 unique accounts in 60 servers yesterday.

(As a side note, if you are one of the many people who thinks they are being cool/funny by sending abusive DMs to the bot, you are mistaken. Hate to end this on a negative note, but it had to be said.)

[August]

It has been a while since the last update, and the list of changes is staggering! Here are the highlights.

Features

1. NSNexus: connect NS servers together for fun and diplomacy! It is integrated seamlessly, easy to set up, and just as easy to moderate as an ordinary channel. See the dispatch for full details.
2. Logs: the bot logs absolutely everything it can get its hooves on. It is not greedy, though--if you want your server's logs, give it the command and it will share. Better yet, only admins can access full channel logs, and after one look they self-destruct. (Really.)
3. Server passwords: you now have the ability to set a password on your server. Nobody can enter unless you have given it to them. Simple as that.
4. Bot post editing: server moderators and above can edit the bot's posts on their servers. This is intended for posts made collectively by staff (such as in information channels), so editing does not need to rely on one person, but there could be all sorts of creative uses for this.
5. Nation banning: servers can ban accounts preemptively based on their verified nations. If you really hate that September guy but do not have his user ID, ban his nation to keep him from getting in.
6. Triggers: a classic feature where you speak a trigger phrase and the bot responds with some predetermined output.
7. Users by region: if you ever had the urge to do a demographic survey of your region, now you can. This command breaks down your whole server's membership by region of residency.
8 Iterate: by far the most powerful command that nobody ever uses, the mighty ITERATE! This command does nothing on its own, but combined with other commands it can save you hours of work. In short, it lets you run a command multiple times at once using different sets of arguments.

Improvements

NSVerify
1. If you join multiple NSV-enabled servers at once, each verification process waits for the previous one to finish before beginning. In the past they would run simultaneously, which was very confusing for the user.
2. The bot now makes it extremely obvious when it wants a nation name and when it wants a verification code, and rejects the answer if it is the wrong one of the two. For some reason a lot of people enter a name when asked for a code and a code when asked for a name.
3. Servers can choose to make privately-verified nations visible only to server staff. In the past the only benefit of privately verifying a nation was that it was not visible to other NSV-enabled servers where the member was present.
4. Re-verifying a nation updates your roles. In the past members had to wait until the bot's daily update for their roles to be corrected if they changed regions or revived a nation.
5. Sending the bot an uploaded image in the middle of verification no longer breaks the process. I have no idea why people were doing this to begin with.
6. If a member joins a server with join messages enabled and goes through NSV, the join message is not sent until after their verification is complete.

Scheduling
1. Long-term repeating commands have the correct intervals now. In the past the scheduler did not account for leap years and varying month lengths.
2. Commands cannot be scheduled to repeat less than a minute apart.
3. Scheduled commands on a server no longer fail to run if the bot's command prefix changes on that server.

Settings
1. The initial setup process no longer breaks when it tries to create roles and channels on a server with several hundred existing roles or channels.
2. Canceling is now an option when you are prompted by the settings menu to enter some text, such as a welcome message.
3. If you add the bot to multiple servers at once, only one initial setup process runs at a time. In the past they would run simultaneously, which was very confusing for the server owner.
4. Aliases and censoring are no longer part of the settings menu. Instead, they have their own commands.
5. The >settings command no longer breaks if you delete the message containing the menu instead of using the [5] button to close it.
6. Command prefixes are now limited to 32 characters.
7. The initial setup process no longer allows you to enter a nonexistent region when it asks which region is associated with your server. Seems obvious, right?

Utilities
1. The >post command can now upload images.
2. The >post command is no longer restricted to Power Users if it is being used via an alias. In other words, a standard user cannot use >post, but they can use an alias for >post if one has been created. This opens up custom commands to everyone.
3. Servers can create their own types of private alerts. In the past only the preset options "VC," "movie," "game," and "event" were available.
4. The output of the >uptime command is more detailed, making it easier to tracking downtime.
5. The embed command was split into >embed, which lets you create a long and detailed embed using prompts, and >quick_embed, which allows less detail but is faster and can be aliased.

Moderation/Administration
1. Channel logs are condensed for size and ease of reading.
2. Channel logs now include events for messages of any age. In the past edits, deletions, and reactions to messages outside the bot's cache were not recorded.
3. Messages are now logged even when the bot experiences downtime, although deletions, edits, and reactions are not.
4. Messages sent before the bot joined a server are now logged, although deletions, edits, and reactions are not.
5. The >ignore command is now available to moderators, not just administrators.
6. The system that logs server events to a channel was upgraded. You can choose to make the logs basic (arrivals, departures, and role assignments) or thorough (everything else).

NS commands
1. The nation command now provides links to card decks.
2. Commands no longer break if you include a # in a nation or region name for whatever reason.

General
1. The self-request role feature has been upgraded to allow mutually-exclusive role groups. For example, if a server has a role for each continent so that members can show where in the world they live, you could put them in a group of self-request roles so that each member could only have one. If a member has a role in a mutually-exclusive group and they request another one, their current role is removed first.
2. When a command tells you the elapsed time since a user account was created, a user account joined a server, or a server was created, the time now shows hours or minutes if it is less than a day.

Other
1. The bot is now more resistant to connection failures. Things are less likely to break if the bot goes down for any length of time.
2. A number of back-end tools have been added to speed up troubleshooting.

Usage
78 servers
2800 unique accounts
4000 non-unique accounts (combined server size including cross-membership)
6150 all-time unique accounts
4230 verified nations
0 security incidents

As always, if you have any questions about how to use the bot or what it can do for you, these are the best options:
-The >help command
-Joining the support server
-Sending me a Discord DM
-Posting in this thread

Enjoy the new features and fixes!

[August]

New feature: total server backups! What does this mean? If your server admin or some lesser bot goes rogue and erases literally everything, hope is not lost. One simple command can restore everything except messages: your icon and other settings, channels and overwrites, roles and permissions, nicknames, bans, emojis, and even the bot's configuration for the server. The feature even works if the bot has been kicked from the server (as long as you bring it back). It is impossible to perfectly reproduce deleted messages and invites, unfortunately, but even lost messages can be found with >retrieve_channel_logs. Everything else comes back effortlessly. It is 2020, and server destruction is officially a thing of the past! See the Server Owners submenu of >help for details.

[The Unified Missourtama States]

[redacted] figured it out

[Zentata]

Hey August, would it be possible to have a feature that can show you how many other nations each nation in a region has endorsed in the past week, or the top ten nations that have endorsed the most people in the past week. Perhaps showing the percentage of nations that each nation in the region has endorsed would be nice as well. Is this possible?

[August]

Hey August, would it be possible to have a feature that can show you how many other nations each nation in a region has endorsed in the past week, or the top ten nations that have endorsed the most people in the past week. Perhaps showing the percentage of nations that each nation in the region has endorsed would be nice as well. Is this possible?

Responded to this offsite. Sorry for the delay! For anyone else curious about the answer, it is not really feasible to implement this for the public because the bot would have to track which nations were being endorsed by each of the world's 30k+ WA nations and store that data over time. However, I did implement it for Thalassia (Zentata's region) because they are long-term users and asked nicely.

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Usage stats!

Last time I released these, there were 2800 unique accounts and 4230 verified nations. Those have more than doubled: we are now up to >6000 unique accounts and nearly 8500 verified nations. That means one in every 800 nations ever created has been verified with NSV, even though NSV has only been public for 4% of the game's existence. The only stat that has not dramatically increased since the last update is "security incidents," which still sits at zero. Sorry to disappoint.

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Features and fixes!

Lots of things. Rather than reformat the whole list for the forum, I will just give a brief synopsis of the last week's changes, and direct anyone curious for more details to the support server.
1. Daily update: this is now split into two parts, one of which is run by a special support bot that will relieve load from the main bots. Better uptime and more reliable data all around.
2. NSV: a couple minor bug fixes and a lot of new filters to combat the most common user errors. Also, you can now set a nation as private after verification, not just during.
3. Help menu: updated with all the changes to NSV and NS commands.

[August]

Updated the OP. Stats update: couple thousand more verifications, no big deal.

[August]

v2GE no longer records any messages at any time for any reason. I made this change in mid-October to comply with Discord's new requirements for verified bots, and users were made aware immediately, but I did not get around to posting about it onsite until now.

Server backups and event logging are still functional. Server backups run on command, not by themselves, and include things like the server's name, emojis, role permission settings, etc, not messages. Event logging is the optional feature that allows the bot to send a message in the server when a channel or role is modified, a member joins or leaves, a message is edited or deleted, and so on.

Stats update:
265 servers
6823 unique users
13223 verified nations
>99% uptime
0 security incidents

Happy second birthday to v2!

[Comfed]

Hmm, now maybe people will be less paranoid about it

[August]

Announcing the NSVerify pseudo-API!

NSVerify now has an API (sort of). This means you can write scripts/bots that use NSV data--namely, the list of nations verified by each member of a server. For example, if you want a custom bot that assigns a special role to members of your server who are Regional Officers in other regions, you can create it without needing to implement your own verification system and database. The possibilities are limitless! If you have feature suggestions, please bring them to the support server.

[August]

Hot on the heels of the new RMB posting API endpoint comes... the world's first global RMB bot!

It is now possible to use some of the Moose's commands on any RMB in the world. Please read the dispatch, give it a try, and let me know if you have suggestions!

[Freedomanica]

Wonderful , works like a charm! Great to see the moose integrating more onsite and is sure to universally boost RMB activity!

[All Wild Things]

Awesome! I'm picturing you having been up late through the night to deliver that one!

Well done, that's yet another fantastic bit of kit you've shared with the 'verse.

[August]

Awesome! I'm picturing you having been up late through the night to deliver that one!

Well done, that's yet another fantastic bit of kit you've shared with the 'verse.

I was scrambling, I admit. I will be traveling today, so I wanted to be done before then, and also I was challenging myself to bang out something usable within a day of noticing the new API endpoint. Adapting the code from Discord needed a lot of troubleshooting.

Thank you to both of the above--glad you like it!

[All Wild Things]

Awesome! I'm picturing you having been up late through the night to deliver that one!

Well done, that's yet another fantastic bit of kit you've shared with the 'verse.

I was scrambling, I admit. I will be traveling today, so I wanted to be done before then, and also I was challenging myself to bang out something usable within a day of noticing the new API endpoint. Adapting the code from Discord needed a lot of troubleshooting.

Thank you to both of the above--glad you like it!

Lol! I'll bet!

Setting up The Moose to reply in it's own region was a stroke of genius. Very cleverly done.
I'm in Osiris just now, so not wanting to abuse their RMB (too much). It looks like you have commands that deliver CSV, and charts etc. How are these handled?
Figured it out by looking at the first post in the region.
So CSV is directly posted onto RMB (looks like it has 2 commas instead of single comments tho)
And images are provided as links.
Nice work.

[August]

So CSV is directly posted onto RMB (looks like it has 2 commas instead of single comments tho)

CSV, image, and HTML files are posted as links. There are some commands that output double-comma delimited lists on RMBs, such as >endo and >swap, but that is different from commands like >region_csv.

(I started using double commas a while back because the bot was dealing with lists of items that frequently contained commas or semicolons or other common delimiters. Then I extended that to all lists for consistency. Kind of a quirk, but it does not really cause issues--you can still send telegrams to a double-comma-separated list of nations, for example.)

[All Wild Things]

So CSV is directly posted onto RMB (looks like it has 2 commas instead of single comments tho)

CSV, image, and HTML files are posted as links. There are some commands that output double-comma delimited lists on RMBs, such as >endo and >swap, but that is different from commands like >region_csv.

(I started using double commas a while back because the bot was dealing with lists of items that frequently contained commas or semicolons or other common delimiters. Then I extended that to all lists for consistency. Kind of a quirk, but it does not really cause issues--you can still send telegrams to a double-comma-separated list of nations, for example.)

Ah! Thanks for clarifying. Interesting idea with the double comma. There are so many problematic CSV files where a text field contains a comma!