ChaosBot

Chaos, the vacant and infinite space which existed according to the ancient cosmogonies previous to the creation of the world, and out of which the gods, men, and all things arose.

ChaosBot is a social coding experiment to see what happens when the absolute direction of a software project is turned over to the open source community.

How it works

1. Fork the code and make any changes you wish.
2. Open a pull request.
3. If there is general approval* from the community, the PR will be merged automatically by ChaosBot.
4. ChaosBot will automatically update its own code with your changes and restart itself.
5. Go to #1

In effect, you get to change the basic purpose and functionality of ChaosBot, at your discretion.

What will ChaosBot do? It's up to you. The only thing it does now is update itself with your changes. And as long as the code connecting itself to new changes remains intact, ChaosBot will continue to grow and change according to your will.

Some things it could do

• Provide some useful service to people.
• Be malicious.
• Recreate itself in a different programming language.
• Break itself and die.

There is no set purpose. What ChaosBot makes itself into is entirely up to the imagination of the open source community.

Voting

Votes on a PR are determined through following mechanism:

• A comment that contains an emoji signifying a vote somewhere in the body counts as a vote for or against the PR.
• Same for reactions on the PR itself and an accept/reject pull request review
• The PR itself counts as 👍 from the owner, unless they vote otherwise.
• Voting goes on for the duration of the voting window - currently 2 or 3 hours, depending on the local server time.
• While the voting process is going, users can change their reactions and edit their comments, effectively changing their vote.

Emoji which count as votes are:

• +1: 👍 ❤️ 🎉
• -1: 👎 😕

Death Counter

Chaosbot has died 6 times. This counter is incremented whenever the trunk breaks and the server must be restarted manually. Last broken by #97

Server details

• ChaosBot runs with Python 3.6.1 on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty
• Its process is managed under supervisor. Avoid writing your own process-management tooling unless it is going to replace supervisor completely.
• It has root access on its server. This means you are able to install packages and perform other privileged operations, provided you can initiate those changes through a pull request.
• Its domain name is chaosthebot.com.
• It's hosted on a low-tier machine in the cloud. This means there aren't a ton of resources available to it: 2TB network transfer, 30GB storage, 2GB memory, 1 cpu core. Try not to deliberately DoS it.
• MySQL is installed locally.

Local Development Server

To run your own VM for local development, install Vagrant and VirtualBox. Then, type on your host machine:

vagrant up
vagrant ssh

When in SSH:

sudo su
cd /vagrant
python3 chaos.py

FAQ

Q: What happens if ChaosBot merges bad code and doesn't start again?

A: Errors can happen, and in the interest of keeping things interesting, ChaosBot will manually be restarted and the death counter will be incremented.

Q: What is "general approval" from the community?

A: Users must vote on your PR, through either a comment or reaction, or a accept/reject pull request review. See Voting.

Q: What if ChaosBot has a problem that can't be solved by a PR?

A: Please open a project issue and a real live human will take a look at it.