Introducing Combat Box Flight Following!

[Creep]

Combat Box Flight Following is a Discord bot that can notify you when your friends are online and playing on Combat Box. There are two ways in which it can be used:

1. Via direct messages to the bot. This creates a personalized list of people that only you are following. The bot will message you directly when these people come online and go offline. To get started, simply send $help via direct message to the bot named Combat Box Flight Following. You can find the bot in the #flight-following channel of the Combat Box Discord server.
2. Via a channel in your Discord server. This creates a shared list of people that are being followed within the channel where the commands are issued. This is ideal for squads - set it up once and everyone in the channel receives the notifications. To get started, you will need to invite the bot to your Discord server with this link. After that, you will see a bot named Combat Box Flight Following in your server - send $help in any channel where the bot has read message permissions to get started.

If you run into any issues using this service or have ideas about additional features, please let me know!

Edited August 22, 2020 by QB.Creep
updated command prefix for bot

[Creep]

Hey everyone! Just made several enhancements to the bot that I want to share:

1. A new feature is available - map following! The bot keeps track of the map rotation on Combat Box and notifies you when the maps you are interested are going to start. Simply type $fm (which stands for follow map) followed by the name of the map. You can use a partial name (e.g. "rhine" which the bot correctly identifies as "Crossing_the_Rhine_Mar_1945"). By default, you will be notified 15 minutes before a map starts and again when it actually begins. You may supply one optional parameter to indicate how far an advance you wish to be notified before the map begins. You can specify up to 5 notifications per map, which you must specify in minutes. Each notification must be separated with the pipe character (e.g. 15|60|120 indicates that you wish to receive notifications 15, 60, and 120 minutes before the map begins). You may also send $help you can see additional details about this feature, including how to check which maps you are following, disable notifications, and check to see what the current map is at any time. To sum up, here are two examples of valid map following commands:
   • $fm rhine (notify me 15 minutes before "Crossing_the_Rhine_Mar_1945" will start on Combat Box and again when it starts)
   • $fm rhine 15|60|120|300 (notify me 15 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, and 5 hours before "Crossing_the_Rhine_Mar_1945" will start on Combat Box and again when it starts)
2. Shorter command names! Fewer keystrokes are required for following and unfollowing players. Send $help to the bot for details.
3. Added player counts to player list and who commands. This makes it easier to, at a glance, see how many players are online, what the map balance is, etc.
4. Automatically update followed players who have changed their name since you started following them. Players were already tracked by a unique identifier which does not change, but the names weren't being updated (which was pretty confusing).

I have another feature in the works that isn't quite ready yet - more to come on that soon!

[Creep]

Hello again! A new command is now available that I hope will be useful to everyone: $event. What this does is return the top five best times (day of week and UTC hour) to host an event based on the last 30 days of activity for players being followed. The list is ordered first by the total number of players who have played in a time slot, and then by the total number of times all players have played in that time slot. 

 

This makes it super easy to coordinate squad events - add the bot to your own Discord server, follow all squad members in a channel, and use the $event command to see what the best time is for players across different time zones to fly together! 

[Creep]

Made a tiny update to the bot to account for increased map time for the map following feature (increased from 2.5 hours to 3.0 hours). 

[Haluter]

Sad to hear that you will be retiring this very useful bot. I've been using it since day 1 ?