Socrates

Day 3,550, 09:40 • Published in Belgium Belgium • by Curlybear

Hello everyone,

Today I’m here to present my latest erep-related project, which this article will serve as a submission to the Plato Foundation. As you’ll read below, this project is not a one-shot thing and requires a continuous investment of time and money to keep going. I’m therefore aiming for a grant type of sponsorship from Plato.

Now onto the project itself.

Socrates


Following the recent shift of the community to Discord away from IRC, we’ve been lacking a good bot related to eRepublik. That’s where azaraliiii came into play. At the time he simply asked if anyone could make a simple bot to list a country’s mpps. Being quite bored (aren’t we all a bit) I took him up on it and started working on Socrates, at the time lazily named “Derp-Bot”. After a few hours I reached a first version of the bot which I ran on my laptop when it was needed and could basically only do one thing: list mpps.



As the eRepublik API is not available / non existent at the time, I relied upon the API provided by https://www.erepublik-deutschland.de/en and spend hours bugging Master_rg about the quirks of it to see what I could do with it and how I could make Socrates learn new tricks. During the following weeks I added quite a few features like job listing, player history, country info, search by citizen name,… here is a complete list :



I’m extremely thankful to Master_rg for the time he spent helping me and his work for the community. While on the subject you should all check out https://erepublik.tools/ which is the new version of erepublik-deutschland that Master_rg is currently working on.

Having the bot functional was neat and all but I couldn’t keep my laptop on 24/7 which meant a lot of downtime for users. Since I already rent a VPS where I run my website and IRC bouncer I decided to make the jump and start running Socrates a bit more professionally. I’ll skip the technical pain it was, but after a few hours of tinkering I had Socrates running smoothly all the time for all to enjoy. Currently Socrates is present on a few Discord servers, including the official eRepublik server, eBelgium, eNetherlands, eItaly and a few private ones. I haven’t really promoted it so far so I’m hoping more people contact me to get Socrates on their own servers.

I plan on keeping Socrates running as long as eRepublik exist and to keep maintaining it by adding new features when to opportunities arise (the bottleneck being what is available in the API). The next feature I’ll add is a correct management of permissions to give owners more control over Socrates.

For those interested in adding Socrates to their own servers here is the invite link (you have to be the owner of the server to add the bot) :


It’s still a work in progress so any feedback you can give me is a huge help. If you have any ideas for features you’d like to see added, I’m also interested, just be realistic and I’ll see what I can do.

Thank you all for you attention,
Curlybear