The previous update was a general plan of attack and spelled out what I think would be key to a useful sustainable Q&A bot ( value accounting / extraction / redistribution), now it is time to get my hands dirty.
I followed the developer introduction which is quite clear and I had a working bot quite quickly, then I made two beginner mistakes.
<tl;dr> I hope others will read them and learn from my mistake or post some ⚠️ warning signs to prevent them.
Reading into the next part with the bot-example I immediately realize I have two problems:
So while I let the main net headless-wallet sync, I started a new wallet using the testnet as per the bot-example.
Following the bot-example, install a new testnet wallet and the byteball-tn app.
Again I generate the pairing QR code using the free ZXing QR generator, but for some reason, I kept getting "no byteball-prefix" or "invalid pairing code".
At this point, I wasn't sure if it was because testnet worked differently so I kept trying different things... I message the Byteball Dev Telegram and received an answer about pairing secret with conf.js .
Turns out in conf.js I had set the pairing secret to "* " which means it would ⚠️ accept anything except asterisk , so the QR code should be <pairing_code>@byteball.org/bb-test#0000 and ⚠️not <pairing_code>@byteball.org/bb-test#*
The feedback from last week tells me that I need to worry about Chat record storage. Actually, I had already thought of that earlier as a spam issue. My conceptual solution is to place a one "active" question limit per wallet, furthermore the question is only sent to a limited random selection of other users. There would be an option to boost number of question receivers by increasing the bounty.
One thing that strikes me as a feature with Byteball is the ease of development for front-end developer. It doesn't get more simple then writing javascript code which works right away, now if a REPL was included that would be even better. Low barrier of entry is quite a killer feature, as long as you don't make beginner mistakes like I did :^)
Again, although Q&A bot might seem like an obvious chat bot application, I believe that one that allows micro-transactions might be perhaps useful, at least a good first project to try. In the meantime, I keep typing "mci" on my main net bot to see that it's more than half way done.
I've made some progress with the code, so will keep working on that.
