So the Bsky app decided to not send me notifications about this mention OR the eight other mentions saying the same thing, so I didn't see it until now ... Server restarted, bots should start running again soon. No idea what the issue is, but will investigate, this is the second time it's happened

*700 followers*? Wow! Hello everybody! BBDQ is a tool allowing you to easily build your own Tracery-based Bluesky bot, coding it manually or using an editor. The entire process contains zero generative AI. The site is continuously being developed, and new functionality is always around the corner.

Hmm, looks like my server has been down for a few hours. Should be up again now, and it looks like your bots are functional again.

Serious question - if there was a beta version of Blue Bots Done Quick where you could try out brand new BBDQ functionality a month or two before it became public to everyone, and it was available to anyone who subscribed to the Patreon - would that be of interest to any of you?

As for the wizard, here's the entirety of its source code: bluebotsdonequick.com/bots/towerwi... Everything that bot has ever written is put together from fragments that you can find on that page, all of which are written by Nora. Not exactly what you'd call a large language model.

Had I made bluebotsdonequick five years ago, I would probably have used the term "AI" myself. The reason I don't is that Tracery is *drastically* different from what people think of as AI today. One botmaker calls it "mad libs with rng", which is eerily accurate. The input generates the output.

This is not the kind of AI that takes a simple instruction and generates a response from that. Instead, a real person created a list of responses, and some of those responses fetches responses from other lists. EVERY word you see in those posts have been added to the bot manually by that person.

Words change. Those blog posts are 8+ years old. We used the term "AI" differently back then than how most people use it today. Yes, everything that is posted by a Tracery bot is "generated" by a computer. Technically. However: all of the pieces used for that generation are crafted by a human.

Just pushed a small, but important, change to BBDQ: If your Bluesky account is deleted, taken down, you change your password or anything else happens that prevents BBDQ to log you in to Bluesky, your bot will now automatically be deactivated. *For now*, you won't be notified when this happens.

BBDQ now adds link cards to posts containing links, prominently displaying the website's title and featured image (assuming the linked website has a <meta property="og:image"> tag) for the first link in the post. This will make BBDQ run a *little* bit slower, so please don't overuse it.

NEW FUNCTION: BBDQ now has an advanced post scheduler! - Scroll down to "Posting frequency" and select "At custom times" - Add daily, weekly or monthly posting schedules, as many as you want - Enter times in your own local timezone - Enter what text to post at that time - or stick with the default

Since scheduled posts are now implemented, here's the next Patreon Feature poll! www.patreon.com/posts/featur... Vote for what YOU want me to implement next on BBDQ. This time, the options are better error handling, Corpora implementation, link cards, and teaching bots to REMEMBER stuff!

NEW FUNCTION: BBDQ now has an advanced post scheduler! - Scroll down to "Posting frequency" and select "At custom times" - Add daily, weekly or monthly posting schedules, as many as you want - Enter times in your own local timezone - Enter what text to post at that time - or stick with the default

My little guide to tracery sets, constants, and using sets for alt text is about done; it needs some cross browser testing and for other human beings who aren't me to look at it and say if anything seems confusing or incorrect. nyoom.neocities.org/using_sets

Working on the BBDQ scheduler function, and I have a couple of questions for you: - If you set your bot to post at a given time on the 31st of every month, what would you expect to happen in a month with less than 31 days? - Is it important/vital for bots to auto-adjust for daylight savings time?

Quick question out of curiosity – if there was a custom BBDQ domain (am considering bbdq.org – .com and .net were taken) that allowed you to easily get BBDQ themed handles for your bots (for free, obviously), would anyone be interested in using something like that?

Six months later, there are more than 800 active bots (+ 200 inactive ones), with a total follower count of 230.000. (If we exclude the two huge outliers that are mostly non-bot-accounts, we're at 92.000 followers. Which is, you know, still *fantastic*.) This is why your bot is slow sometimes.

If you're wondering what BBDQ has in store for the future, I tend to jot down a lot of the things I really want to do with the website on the project's GitHub repository: github.com/olafmoriarty... Suggestions and feedback are welcome there, too (and here, of course).

Okay, I am SO implementing this in BBDQ one day.

Testing something: Posting order, which basically controls the accuracy of your posting frequency, is now sorted by posting frequency, meaning weekly or daily bots will be more accurate than hourly or ten-minutely bots. Bots with many followers will also be more accurate than bots with few.

Okay, I think most of the bugs surrounding last weekend's outage are gone now. Let me know if you have one I haven't fixed. The big issue still present is that the bsky connection is *slow* now. Posting a single post takes roughly five seconds, more if it has images, so 100 posts take >8 minutes.

Kinda pondering just how unpopular it would be if I removed the "post every 10 minutes" option so that twice an hour was the most frequent posting option. There's currently 70+ active bots using it, so changing them to every 30 minutes COULD reduce traffic and speed up the site quite significantly.

Ping @uni-strategic-bot.bsky.social @redlinecrooksquote.bsky.social @ai-fearz.bsky.social @holaveracruz.bsky.social @holy-mountain.bsky.social: If you are experiencing issues with your bots not posting to bluesky, this COULD be the reason and a possible solution.

Looks like the bots are back in town 👀 There were approximately eighty bots that couldn't be authenticated with bsky because of wrong passwords or account takedowns. I took the liberty of deactivating those. Creating NEW bots still doesn't work, but I have a plan for how to fix it. But not today.

Okay, the fix seems to work well for the thirteen bots I have updated manually so far. I'll aim to set up a system to update the remaining 1034 bots over the next couple of days and auto-update new bots, which should return everything to normal. When all of that is done, I'll reactivate the Patreon

Oh my god. I think I found a way to fix it. I ACTUALLY FOUND A WAY TO FIX IT. It will require a little code and quite a bit of manual labor, but it appears to be DOABLE. By "manual labor" I mean I hope I can automate it, but it should be possible to reinstate the biggest bots manually.

Still no updates, sorry. But if you desperately need a "quick"*) fix to get your bot back up and running again, here are two things you COULD do: a) Move your bot to another PDS b) Host your own instance of bbdq Details in thread. *) (None of these are actually very quick)

So there appears to have been a Bluesky outage tonight, and there are a couple of new issues with Blue Bots Done Quick that occur as a result of that. I will look into the details of this as soon as I'm able to, but that may not be until 8-10 hours from now - sorry for that.

Are anyone else experiencing this issue, or other issues with bots posting or not posting for the past few hours?

The first BBDQ Feature Poll is up on Patreon and will run for a week. I've added four options for new features (link cards, better error handling, better post scheduling or a meaty tutorial), and *you* get to decide which one I'll prioritize working on in May! www.patreon.com/posts/featur...

Realized a random cool thing about this: You can actually use the custom replies function without knowing or using Tracery at all. Your output strings CAN be randomized using Tracery, but if you just want to set up a bot that always replies with the same message to the same keyword, you can.

BLUE BOTS, DONE QUICK EASTER UPDATE! - You can now (*finally!*) set your bot to generate custom replies based on the message it's replying to! - There's now a main menu - this should make some pages easier to find! - Oh, yeah, and I added a Patreon. Let me know what you think!

BLUE BOTS, DONE QUICK EASTER UPDATE! - You can now (*finally!*) set your bot to generate custom replies based on the message it's replying to! - There's now a main menu - this should make some pages easier to find! - Oh, yeah, and I added a Patreon. Let me know what you think!

Current plan: I am now working on custom replies functionality, and hope to be done with that in a week or two. After that, I'll set up a cheap Patreon where you can vote on what function I should develop next (I have *so* many ideas!).

Tiny update: BBDQ now has a "Post now" button. Clicking "Post now" will make your bot post immediately, no waiting, no matter how short it's been since it last posted, no matter if your bot is activated or not. Should make testing new bots a lot easier. ... Hopefully this won't cause too many bugs.

Quick question, out of curiosity: would anyone be interested in a Blue Bots Done Quick Patreon, if I made one? I imagine that the two primary perks I could offer would be a) getting to vote on which new functions I should develop next and b) early access to new functionality that is still in beta

Quick question, out of curiosity: would anyone be interested in a Blue Bots Done Quick Patreon, if I made one? I imagine that the two primary perks I could offer would be a) getting to vote on which new functions I should develop next and b) early access to new functionality that is still in beta

I haven't been paying attention to it so I didn't notice until now, but it looks like as of January 22, there are more than *five hundred* active BBDQ bots! WOW. Just... wow.

Yep, and with very little brain/learning involved. 1. Register a new bluesky account 2. Create a bot password and log in to bluebotsdonequick.com 3. Write "KEEP CALM\nAND\n#something#" in the origin box 4. Click "something" and write your list 5. Fill out the rest of the settings and activate bot

Ah, now the 30+ new notifications make sense. I'd say there's currently two things that makes BBDQ semi-inappropriate for promo posts: - link cards don't have thumbnails - any account using BBDQ will be displayed in the LIST OF BOTS and you can't opt out I've plans to fix both, but it'll take time

I assume those of you that actually follow this account already knows this, but in case anybody needs to hear it: Blue Bots Done Quick uses *zero* generative AI. No large language models are involved in any part of the website or bots, only the words that you, the bot-maker, manually put into it.

Made a quick example of one way to use the new {n} and {item} tags on bluebotsdonequick.com. @dracula-hourly.bsky.social posts one paragraph from Bram Stoker's "Dracula" every hour - IN ORDER. Using the Editor view, putting the whole book into Tracery format was a simple copy-and-paste.

BIG BBDQ UPDATE! - A brand new Tracery editor which (hopefully) makes it EASIER to create and edit bots! AND - A ton of new shortcodes that vastly increases what your bot can do!

I've been made aware that a recent Bluesky update has changed how they display images and now crop all images that don't have an aspect ratio set. Which unfortunately includes any images posted with BBDQ. Fortunately this is easy to fix and I'll do so as soon as I can (probably in 6-8 hours).

A few more changes to BBDQ: - You can now set your posting frequency to "Never" to make a bot that posts replies and nothing else. - Post preview now shows alt texts. It also warns you if your images don't have alt text. - Post previews can now be regenerated by clicking "Reroll".

Did some quick changes to the frontend of bluebotsdonequick.com now. These include: - A list of ALL (currently 236) active bots, sorted by date or follower count - A separate page for each bot's source code, so you can link to it! Will probably tweak it a bit more later this week.

Made a couple of changes to BBDQ: - Finally - in the "Reply Tracery rule" dropdown, you can now select "Do not post replies". For new bots, this is now the default option. - More posting frequencies added. You can now post every 3 hours, 4 hours or 8 hours in addition to the existing options.

Some very inefficient code on my part caused a bug that made some bots reply to messages multiple times and often it would take 10-15 minutes for them to reply at all. That bug is now fixed. Thanks to @notinventedhere.bsky.social and @aliensunset.bsky.social for making me aware of it.

Got a bug report that <image> tags in SVGs are not working. Have confirmed it to be correct. Will prioritize this and try finding a solution ASAP, but my first attempt at fixing it failed and Google is somewhat unhelpful, so I don't know how long it will take. Hopefully not more than a few days.