This article is about what Poe and Arty do and how they work, for the article about their lore, see Poe Stallmann and Artemus
Poe and Arty are chat bots designed and built by Rowedahelicon for use in SCG. They are fitted with administration and logging tools, a variety of chat applications, and more. Arty came as a replacement for the original SCG Watch Dog that would handle in-server reporting and Poe was built to handle group events.
Their uses as bots are based on one of two general themes. Community applications such as events, posts, membership matters, maintenance notices and so on are generally "handled" by Poe. Security notices, player reports, cheat detections, and "serious" things are handled by Arty.
In 2015, Rowdy set out to make a bot that was capable of delivering news and event messages to people on Steam. Although the SCG Discord opened up the same year, Discord was still a new concept and thus, not widely adapted yet. The need for delivering messages was due to the lack of any sort of notification system on Steam from groups, the only way people could see what was happening in the community was via the website or messages on the server.
Rowdy wanted to make them using either Python or Node.JS, choosing the latter after researching benchmarking comparisons. Their code has changed significantly as time has gone on. The original features included automatic handling of friend invites, being able to invite others via command, sending messages when news was posted and when events were starting (via temporary cron scripts), as well as numerous fun chat commands.
Because the majority of group socalizing took place in the SCG Steam Chatroom at the time, special consideration was done to have fun commands people could use. Poe would also keep track of people leaving and joining the chat, and would announce to people when someone came in. Because the chat was prone to "splitting" (A quiet disconnect where the chat would reset and everyone would have to rejoin it), Poe and Arty would ping each other and if one couldn't see the other's post, a message would be set to everyone who was recorded in the chat at the time informing them of a disconnect.
A lot of these features were removed when Steam updated their chat system, as it was no longer needed or feasible to keep them.
/ask - Ask me stuff about SCG!
/help - Sends the help page over!
/role - Toggle your SCG Discord roles!
/welcome - Become a part of the SCG Discord!
!bone - Bone? BONE?!?
!bellyrub - Don't do it! D:
!chatinvite - I will invite you to our chatroom!
!corgifact - I will send you one random fact about us Corgis!
!commands - I'll show you a list of commands!
!discord - I'll invite you to our discord channel!
!dog - Yes hello!
!events - I will tell you of any upcoming events!
!feed [food] - It is very nice to feed a dog! But ... only when they're hungry ^//w//^;
!friend - Would you like to be my friend? :D
!help - Ditto to !commands
!hug - Dogs do like hugs! :3
!invite - I'll help you join SCG!
!mail - I'll show you what letters I have for ya!
!pet - Good dogs deserve pets!
!play - I'd love to play with ya! But wait for me to drop my toy at your feet!
!scgfact - I will tell you a random fact about SCG!
!servers [name] - I'll tell you about a server, and invite you to it too!
!song - I'll give you a random song!
!updates - I'll give you the latest SCG server updates!
!whatsup - I'll tell you what's going on and whatever is on my mind!
!who - I'll tell you about myself!
Poe and Arty are powered by Node.JS and a series of webhooks. They use an internal flat DB file to keep track of basic information like timestamps, server numbers, etc.