Spent tonight making the bot fun instead of only useful.

It does memes, trivia, a magic 8ball and roasts now. The bigger piece is XP:
you get points for finishing tasks, saving memories and building automations.
100 points is a level and every level has a title. You start as a Lurker. Stick
around long enough and you become a Certified Menace. There’s a leaderboard,
and you can shout someone out which hands them 25 XP.

Three things fought me.

The meme API defaults to r/dankmemes. This is going into a Slack full of
teenagers so that was never happening. Locked it to ProgrammerHumor,
wholesomememes and softwaregore, and I check the nsfw flag on every post too.

The trivia API rate limits to one request every 5 seconds and 429’d me in the
middle of testing my own feature. So I wrote 15 questions myself as a backup.
Trivia never just dies now.

Then the first meme it posted came through titled “partialContent”. Turns out
r/ProgrammerHumor writes every title in camelCase, so I had to split them back
into real words before posting.

Also caught myself farming XP by spamming /sos-done on the same task. It only
pays out now if the task wasn’t already finished.

If you want it shorter, this version keeps the two best details:

Made the bot fun tonight. Memes, trivia, roasts, and an XP system where you
level up for finishing tasks and building automations. You start as a Lurker
and work your way to Certified Menace.

Two things I didn’t expect. The meme API defaults to r/dankmemes, which is not
what you want in a Slack full of teenagers, so I locked it to a safe list and
check the nsfw flag. And the first meme posted with the title “partialContent”
because r/ProgrammerHumor writes everything in camelCase. Had to split the
titles back into words.

Also had to stop myself farming XP by spamming /sos-done on the same task.