Introducing hug.bot

Today I want to introduce you to @hug.bot. It is currently running the (almost) exact code as @sloth.buzz bot, which we put live a few days ago.

The @hug.bot listens to the !HUG command in your comments and delivers a hug token to the person you reply to.

Everyone has one free !HUG per day regardless of how many tokens they have. Because the hug.bot philosophy is:

Everybody deserves a hug!

After that the current levels are:

• One extra hug if you have at least one token in your wallet (so two in total)
• One extra hug if you have at least ten tokens in your wallet (so three in total)

A big thank you at this point to @acidtiger. They went on an AI graphics adventure to create the avatar and token icon.

Working on the @sloth.buzz bot was a great opportunity to get back into coding. We tested that code by connecting it to one of my Splinterlands alt accounts and having it send out NFTM tokens, some basically worthless dust token.

Of course the test base was not big and we needed help from the community to engage with the bot which they did (thank you all for that) to bring the project along.

But further research and development needs another base. That is where @hug.bot comes in.

I utilized an old Raspberry Pi I had still in a drawer and put it to live again. Now the bot code is living in there for the moment.

This gives me the chance to introduce new features and have them tested in the wild without compromising the #slothbuzz token.

When a new code version is considered stable we can then introduce that to the @sloth.buzz bot and set it live there as well.

In the meantime hive has one more gesture token for you to hand out to those who you think need or deserve a hug.

I want to thank @slothlydoesit and the #slothbuzz community for giving me and my code experiments a home in the community.

For my efforts in integrating Discord functionality they provided me with a test channel in the slothbuzz discord as well as suggestions for improvement and of course test cases.

Within the next few weeks I hope to introduce some more error and exception handlers to the code. Once I reach that point I will put up the code to github for the public, as I promised here.

After that the code will be enhanced to include more and more features, such as:

• Configuring more versatile call levels
• Listening to different versions of the command
• Allowing or disallowing other commands in the same comment
• Combinations of stake and liquid prerequisites
• Delivering different (additional) tokens
• Providing statistical data
• Additional Discord connectivity (querying the bot in Discord)
• and so on.

I am looking forward to the experience and will keep you updated on my progress.

Once the code is up on github it will be free to use by anyone who wants it.

If you want to support my efforts, the biggest help would currently be providing an RC delegation to @hug.bot so it can work the blockchain to hand out its hugs. Delegating RC does not diminish your Hive Power (i.e. voting weight or curation rewards).

To do so, simply navigate to your peakd wallet, click the downward arrow next to "DELEGATE" and click "Delegate RC":

Every little bit will be helpful and is much appreciated. If you do so and tell me in the comments, I will !HUG you dearly for it. 😉

Thank you very much.

Well, that is it for today, thank you very much for reading and please, spread those hugs.