Remove IRC from this

[ScottTu]

This thing is annoying as hell in our IRC channel.

[ScottTu]

Really, its garbage. It comes into the channel posts a bunch of gibberish and gets banned. Leave us alone!

[calibrain]

Hi ! I am super sorry about this
Would you have any examples of the message the bot is posting ? And where it is posting them ?
We don't collect any telemetry, so it makes it very hard to debug these kind of issues.

Also note that we don't point users to any IRC channel, and we don't have any "default" one enabled either.
This is the default setup :

Thank you for the report, and sorry again for the issue

[ScottTu]

#ebooks on irchighway.
I'm not sure how many people are using it but I've filled the ban list. Its usually a user joins the channel and starts posting a message with the book title and/or author name over and over. Just an hour ago: fitzy22119248: Deepwater Landing Ken Catran
I hit them with a version check and its Shelfmark. plonk.

[calibrain]

Let me do 2 things real quick
First, I will force it to have an actual bot name string (in your case, the user must manually add "search"), and I will make it that it will stop any kind of retry

This (PR #1065) should stoop the spam for now (if auto update is enabled for the users) and force the users to manually update their config and add the search bot name.

And I will look later this week on adding some kind of toggle per request, something like "use IRC for this search" so it must be clicked manually by users every time, to minimize spam

Would it be possible to directly DM the search bot ? I am not too familiar with IRC and how the bot works there, this feature was implemented by another contributor.
If it's possible, I can look up into changing the code so the bots just talk to each other in private instead of a public thread ?

Again, really sorry about all the trouble

[ScottTu]

Is it even possible for the program to download files from IRC? It depends on the channel too as to how searching works. In mine its @search and @searchook. The bot will send search results in a zip file with a list of results you copy to the channel that tell the book servers to send the book. Here's our help page https://cerealbox.net/irchelp/

[niblem85]

Yes it is and it really simplifies the process. Rather than downloading the zip and reading the .txt and then asking IRC for the file it does this automatically in the background and then downloads only the file. I'm wondering if some users are maybe refreshing constantly or changing the query string to find a book that didn't initially give a result. I'm always very careful to not spam it and respect the limits.

[calibrain]

From my understanding, the current implementation in shelfmark is a fork of https://github.com/evan-buss/openbooks (which was created specifically for irchighway)
I skimmed through the code and I do see some logic to look at the searchbot result and postback the proper !.. stuff

In openbooks, the channel and bot were hardcoded, while in shelfmark, the contributor wanted more flexibility so let people choose channels and names, but I guess we did not properly enforce the @search (or @BOT_NAME) feature

it's now fixed, hopefully the clients will pick up the update in the next 24 hours and it will reduce the spam

[ScottTu]

Cross our fingers, we'll see how it goes.

[calibrain]

Sorry, forgot to create a new release, people on :latest have not auto updated yet (as opposed to :dev who get it immediately)
I just created a new release (bump from v1.3.0 to v1.3.1 ) it should be picked up in the next 24h if people have daily updates !

[niblem85]

@calibrain

IRC search seems broken now with 1.3.1?

For me, search now gives no results. The same search in something like Hexchat shows results with no issues, so it's not that the book isn't available. My settings are unchanged and worked prior to this release. I have search as the bot and ebooks as the channel.

I'm also not sure why some users were posting gibberish, because I can confirm when I use shelfmark it is querying IRC correctly and not spamming prior to this release.

[niblem85]

@calibrain
Yes, I have "search" as the bot.

Just now I tried to search for Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. It returned a single Audiobook release on IRC by "TrainFiles" but no releases for ebooks on IRC (although I know there are many). Clicking refresh does nothing. The logs suggest this is because there is a cooldown occurring:

[shelfmark] 2026-06-17T17:44:25.880009000Z 2026-06-17 17:44:25,879 - shelfmark.release_sources.irc.source - INFO - source.py:256 - IRC query on cooldown, not re-posting to channel: Words of Radiance Brandon Sanderson

What seems to be occurring is that it will search for either a book OR an audiobook (whatever you chose first) and it will not search the same title again due to cooldown (even if I want a book and an audiobook, you only get whichever it searches first since the second search is not allowed now).

[calibrain]

Ohh I see what is going on
I will fix it, to avoid spamming, I added a "cool down" period, but it might be too strict
I will change some of the logic to be more predictable

[calibrain]

Should be fixed now, v1.3.2 is currently deploying and should be available in ~1h

[ScottTu]

Whatever you did it seems to be working.

[niblem85]

Should be fixed now, v1.3.2 is currently deploying and should be available in ~1h

I can confirm this is now working for me.