RTFM or pay!!!

Yes I said it. Now I will elaborate. We have been providing help...no we've been writing scripts for people who don't take the time to just read the manual and look at the scripts posted here for examples. Now we are getting frustrated with it all, and screaming RTFM. Daychilde had a little something about umm...paying for scripts when the script requests board was created. Was it foresight?

Most requests tend to lean towards the Icy Peak. Meat farming ya know. 100-200K a day. Pocket lining scripts. Now I'm wanting to scream "No, don't RTFM...cough up some of that meat you've been making farming the Icy Peak".

If we start going with Daychilde's original ideas maybe there will be less tension in the forums. Everyone keep in mind that I made several posts in the beginning that were simple "how to do this" posts. I'm all for helping those who help themselves. I'm just becoming more to the tone of being all for gaining from the lazyness of others.
 

macman104

Member
I'm going to add my voice to this. This place was supposed to be a repository for people to come and discuss their scripts. Instead, most of it has become a repository for people to ask for us to make them a script, and that makes me sad. I'd like to ask that any further request for script be responded to by linking them to the user manual and asking for specific questions related to their script. We will not write scripts for you on demand, that's not what we are here for.
 

Bishy

New member
you're right macman, i've only started scripting a couple days ago and even i can see that some of the script requests are extremely easy. guess you'll just have to stop being so nice to people who are just plain lazy :p
 

holatuwol

Developer
Way back in the early stages of the KoLmafia project, I often took the time to write browser-based scriptlets for KoL, based either on requests I saw in game play, received from clan mates, or saw in the contests forum.  For those unfamiliar with the scriptlet era, scriptlets could be said to be the predecessors to today's KoL GreaseMonkey scriptlets, except they didn't have the comfortable high-level DOM layer that GreaseMonkey provides AND you had to squeeze your code onto ONE LINE making it near impossible to maintain and debug.

In one case in the contest forum, someone was attempting to pay for a script that was equivalent to the idea of a bulk-buffing tool embedded straight into the chat pane.  Selling buffs seemed to be something very popular in /trade, and if you refreshed your messages, it'd be nice to have an easy way to buff the person (quite clearly, this pre-dates buffbots).  Also, this could be used to buff multiple people at once with several clicks.  The price tag was several million meat.

It seemed like it'd be relatively easy and fun, and the compensation seemed good, so I went ahead and did it and named the result a "buff bombing" script.  Eventhough it satisfied all the requirements, the requester, now having seen it in action, couldn't come up with a good reason to use it.  Payment?  Never happened.  (I wound up using it every now and then to buff cool people in /trade, but their numbers dwindled and disappeared.)

A long while thereafter, someone offered me 40,000,000 meat to enhance the KoLmafia buffbot engine to give them a set of very specific features tailored for a very specific event they wished to handle.  While generally I ignore requests like this, I felt that the feature set was interesting, and I decided to add it to the core KoLmafia engine.  Once implemented, I told them that the entire feature set requested was available in the core engine, and if they wished, they could pay for the resulting product.

I never got a reply back, but it turns out they canceled the event they wanted to handle due to the unveiling of Testudinata (or maybe one of the other Otori bots... like DSA or an improvement to sneaksie's offerings).  It should come as no surprise, then, that they bailed on the payment, not only because they wouldn't make full use of it (just use some of the features for general buffbot maintenance), but probably because the features they requested were now publicly available for free and they could use it without feeling obligated to pay the promised commission.

The moral of this story: if you ever choose to do commissioned scripting, make sure that the person pays before you begin your work.  Basically, I suggest a "Half now, half on completion" approach (if the person doesn't trust you), an "Everything now" approach (if the person does trust you), but never accept IOUs or "I'll pay when it's done" excuses.
 
This thread was actually started as a conversation starter to see what the general oppinion is. The reality is I don't see myself charging for writing scripts because the program is in fact free. Why charge someone for something to go along with a free program? It seems though that not many are interested in voicing their thoughts.
 
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