The Magic Story Machine: Automatically check and warn about submission length

Project Background

The Magic Story Machine is an open source bot for the Steem blockchain which enables collaborative storytelling. Prospective contributors suggest additions to the story by commenting on a daily post.

According to the mechanics of the storytelling game, which creator @mkt describes more fully in this post, additions to the story are determined by community upvotes (i.e curation). Contributions that are chosen for inclusion in the story are rewarded with a share from a 'pot' of cryptocurrency generated by the game's daily posts.

Of course, all story suggestions — whether daily winner or not — can earn Steem for the poster.

Components

This suggestion expands the validation and user feedback experience of the bot. This would involve modifying mainly:

https://github.com/mktcode/the-magic-story-machine/blob/master/bot.js

Proposal

By design users propose each addition to the running story by making a comment to the main daily post. This comment must begin with a blockquote (denoted in Markdown by the character > followed by a space):

> Write here what you want to append to the story, in one line.
Leave a space after the > and use no more than 250 characters.

As noted in the template above there is currently a limit of 250 characters for each submission. If the user submits his suggestion via a website specifically designed for the contest it will be checked to enforce this limit.

In contrast submissions made by another Steem blockchain platform — Steemit, for example — are not validated this way. It is easy for a new or very enthusiastic contributor to run over the limit. Indeed this author did so on his own first submission.

After determining if a comment begins with a blockquote it can be further validated as to whether it is shorter than 250 characters. If the submission is too long the bot can post feedback stating so, as well as recommending use of the game website to avoid the mistake in the future.

Mockups / Examples

Here is a sample implementation to illustrate the validation in pseudocode, assuming an events framework similar to SteemBot and a utility library like Lodash:

bot.onComment((comment, responder) => {
  if (_.startsWith(comment.body, '> ') && comment.body.length > 250) {
    responder.comment(
      'You exceeded the character limit of 250.' +
        'Please use http://the-magic-frog.com/' +
        'to avoid this common mistake.'
    );
  }
});

Here is how the process might appear to the user:

---

Image src CC-0 from Pixabay (remixed)

---

Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

---