One of the things I enjoy most about building on Hive is that there is always something to improve.
Sometimes it’s fixing something that broke. Sometimes it’s making the servers a little happier. And sometimes it’s one of those evenings where you start with “I’ll just add one small feature…” and, somehow, several days later, half the project has evolved.
That last one happened again.
Over the past weeks I’ve been working on the entire MMB bot family. Not just @mmbbot, but also
@indeedly,
@hopelizer,
@weirdly,
@thestrider and
@zombiebot. Most of the changes aren’t flashy, and honestly that’s usually a good sign. Infrastructure should quietly do its job while everyone else is busy using it.
Still… there are a few additions that I think are worth mentioning.
The biggest one is probably the raffle system.
From now on, every valid tip automatically becomes a raffle ticket. A few times a day one of those tips gets picked at random, and the winner receives a handful of tokens from somewhere within the MMB ecosystem. Usually it’s a small prize, every now and then somebody will hit a much bigger jackpot containing all six community tokens.
No extra commands, no registration, no remembering to click another button. If you’re already tipping people, you’re already participating.
I also added something people have been asking about for quite a while: statistics.
Reply with !MMB stats (or !MMB status) and the bot will send you a memo showing your current level, your daily allowance, how many tips you’ve used today and your lifetime tipping numbers.
The nice part is that the command still tips the author, so checking your stats doesn’t cost somebody else a tip.
The bots will also start celebrating milestones now. Reach 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 or even 10,000 tips sent or received and you’ll get a small congratulations message. Nothing spectacular… just a little acknowledgement that you’ve been helping build this community.
The weekly reports also received some love.
Instead of feeling like automatically generated summaries, they’re now written fresh every week, include charts showing the top tippers and recipients, and I decided to add one more little incentive.
From now on, 80% of the post rewards from those weekly reports go to that week’s top tipper.
It seemed fitting. The people spreading the most appreciation around Hive should probably receive a little appreciation themselves.
As always, none of this would exist without people actually using the bots. Watching the numbers grow over the years has been rewarding, but seeing people discover someone new through a simple tip is still my favourite part of the whole project.
And no… I’m probably not done yet.
I rarely am.
There’s already another list of ideas waiting on my desk.
(My coffee, on the other hand, has once again gone cold.)
All photos are my own, shot on my iPhone and sometimes edited in Lightroom.
AI images? Those are created by me too, using my own prompts.
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