Just thought it's time for an update on Smurfy Gardeners.

We got to about 100 members after 4 months and !fill wasn't working as well as I'd hoped.

I think its largely a numbers problem because although we had 100 members in total, at any time only ~50% are online, and of those a bunch of people are AFK, busy, or already in a game. Realistically on any use of !fill we might only get 2 people joining the server.

But all is not lost!

There are many regular smurfy players who don't know about the !fill command and hence aren't members of the group. I've now started inviting active players to this group, and in the last 24 hours we've jumped up to 147 members.

Also, there's been a bunch of crashes lately (you'll know when !fill doesn't respond in chat). Some have been fixed but I'm pretty sure there's a few more to go. It's a messy system as when you !fill it goes and checks if the user is a group member, then checks the server status, then posts the announcement to Steam... using a real browser.

Anyways keep using it, and tell us if there's anything we can improve.

Thanks to everyone who has joined the group and is trying out the !fill command so far. Keep bashing on it as I am monitoring & fixing bugs.

Here's how it's supposed to work (so you know when to report that something isn't working right):

When someone types !fill in smurfy #1 or #2 the bot should post an announcement to the group. Whilst this is going on it should say so in the in-game chat, and it should also post a confirmation or failure message when it's done with the announcement.

If the player who attempted to call !fill is not a group member the bot will instead suggest that the player join the group... although obviously you guys won't see this message ;)

One of the bugs fixed today is the chat messaging -- this was previously unreliable, making it difficult to tell if the announcement was successful or not.

Note that announcements are automatically deleted 15-20 minutes after they're posted. This is to avoid filling your Friend Activity feeds with crap.

Also, this whole setup only works if we can get enough people to actually join servers when an announcement is sent out.

Please encourage other server starters to join the group -- i.e. people you already see seeding the servers; they're the type of players who will most likely respond to announcements, and would also benefit from using !fill.

Finally, gsan has been hacking at ways to send direct game invites to players. The big benefit is that you'll receive a regular Steam message that you can click to join the server immediately, instead of having to bring up the server browser after seeing an announcement today. No promises on when that will be live though :]

Work is progressing on this but I'm having trouble thinking of a suitable !trigger keyword.

Suggestions?