Restricting/redirecting output of commands to bot-commands for regular users

Edit: I’ve decided to make this a general issue, since the !free command turns out to be a bit disruptive as well. In python-discussions, there have just been four consecutive calls to !free and it looks very disruptive (see below).

My idea would be to create an easy way to redirect the output of certain commands, free and help, to bot commands for regular users, with the bot sending a temporary message to the user in channel redirecting them there. The bot could then delete that message (and, maybe, the invoking message as well) after a certain amount of time has passed.

Four times !free in python-discussion:

Old message for context: Now the !help command works outside of bot-commands again, we may want to think about restricting the use/output to bot-commands for regular users. The help-embeds are quite sizeable and, therefore, quite disruptive in on-topic channels.

I want to propose to redirect the output of help (the help-embed) to bot-commands for non-staff members, prepended by a mention of the user invoking the command. In addition, we could display a small, non-disruptive embed in the original context channel redirecting the user to bot commands. I think this should also be the case for help-calls on specific commands, as the embeds for those can be quite sizeable as well (e.g., !help site).

Personally, I’d like this restriction to only apply to regular users, so staff can pull up help on a command quickly in channel and use help in the staff channels.

[lemonsaurus]

I don’t really like the idea of a what’s free channel. we already have a channel for that, it’s called #bot-commands.

I think if we took the steps we’ve talked about before in regards to shortening the free command output (only showing the best channels rather than everything for !free and adding a !free all to show everything), it wouldn’t be such a big problem. We could probably increase the channel cooldown a little bit, and then redirect output to #bot-commands if the cooldown is active. This combination of steps should more than curb the problem.

[jb3]

Ah, I assumed it was a user bucket, in that case I agree with you about increasing that, also I don’t know if I agree with auto-delete but maybe auto-delete of any rate limited invocation messages.