For the last few months, I’ve been using Discord, Slack, Hangouts, Signal, Skype, and Teams for chatting with friends, family, colleagues, and clients. Discord is very like Slack, with a few differences because it’s geared toward gamers while Slack focuses on businesses.
Both Slack and Discord support add-ons in the form of ‘bots (robots, or programs that watch for certain events and respond to them). Tupperbox is a robot that has popped up on a couple of servers on which I role-play. It’s used to let you assign actions to issue different responses, based on the inputs. In my most frequent use case, I give it a trigger phrase and it takes whatever follows and makes the text appear to have come from someone else. I can use the robot to make a sentence I type look like it came from one of my characters instead of myself. Instead of “Peter Nikolaidis says that Hector Roundtree says ‘Forsooth!'” you would see “Hector Rountree: ‘Forsooth!'”
The trick is that I need to register every character and its associated trigger phrase, and this confuses me every time, despite the built in help. So I figured I’d document the exact characters I typed right here for next time (and for you, of course, dear reader)!
How register a new character/avatar/name:
tul!register "Hector Roundtree" hrtext
Any time I start a message with the letters “hr” and repackage anything after that to appear to have come from “Hector Roundtree” himself.
I also like to have a different icon for each of my characters. The first step is to upload a small (thumbnail) image, preferably a square with the face in the center, to a publicly reachable URL. I’ve had zero luck linking to OneDrive or iCloud photos, so I upload them to my WordPress site and reference them from there.
tul!avatar "Hector Roundtree" https://example.com/uploads/images/hector-roundtree.png
The above text will register the image with posts made by Sir Hector, instead of a big question mark icon.
Update: Another option I only recently discovered is to drag and drop the avatar picture right into the post, instead of giving a URL. This is a much simpler option!
What if you goof and want to start over? You can always remove and re-register. For example, I registered “JJ:” for one of my characters, and “hr” for another. The problem? For one, the colon is extraneous. I could use “JJ” instead. Also case matters, so “JJ” is not the same as “jj” or “Jj.” I often type posts from my phone, which likes to autocorrect things. For instance, if I start a new post by typing a letter ‘h’ and an ‘r’ by default this will be “Hr.” Great, except I registered “hr” so every time I want to post as Hector, I have to uncapitalize the ‘H’ first. What a pain! That’s where the remove command comes in.
tul!remove "Hector Roundtree"
The above text will remove Hector, letting me re-add him with a simpler trigger phrase. This time I’ll use “Hr” to make for easier posting from my phone.
tul!register "Hector Roundtree" Hrtext
