Forums Scripts & Popups Script no longer functions.

I feel like an idiot posting this but I've run out of options.

I have a trivia game script I've been using for over a year that never had a problem but about a month ago it stopped working. No changes have been made to it and no mIRC upgrades had been made when the script stopped.

I've unloaded it, reloaded it, still nothing. I can't figure it out, it's just stopped working. Obviously something had to change for it to do this but I was hoping someone could give me some things to try to narrow down the problem. I can give the script to whomever wants to take a look at it but due to it's size I won't post it here.

Any help would be appreciated.

Well, any number of things can have changed of course.

Something may have accidentally been changed in the script, e.g. insertion of a letter/number, a bracket mismatch, etc.

It's also possible that one of the variables used by the script was accidentally removed (unlikely to affect the script after reloading) or set to an unusable value.

My advise is to use /debug to see if the script responds with anything, and most of all to add debugging code to the script. For instance, look for the on TEXT event which (I assume) responds to !trivia and add an /echo in the code to see if it is triggered. You keep doing this further down in the code until the echo suddenly doesn't show up anymore.

Check the ignore list in the mIRC the script is loaded in in case *!*@* has inadvertently been ignored.

If not, what exactly doesn't work? A !start trigger or something like that? Try and narrow down which part of the code isn't working and just post that part.

I checked the ignore list, it was empty.

Well, I finally got it working again. It took dumping the script entirely, dumping it's related variables, then extracted the original game script from it's zip file and reinstalled it from scratch.

That was done because I kept going over the script and couldn't figure out what broke it. So, I figured I'd try going back to step #1 and going from there. It worked this time, but I'm curious what it was so I could learn from it. Maybe I will find out another day.

I do appreciate the help offered here. That's why I come here.

Too bad you didn't keep the information stored elsewhere before you did the complete restore from the original zip. You (or someone else) might've been able to see the problem by comparing the working and non-working codes.

Yeah, you're right, I should've thought about that first. Well, if it dies again I know what to do. It would be nice to know what happened, if anything just to learn something.

The people in my channel are very happy to have the trivia game back up and running though. I run a bot in the channel that handles some basic stuff but the ops have come to depend on it for some basic functions. The game runs on this bot with other scripts.

After getting the game running again, I did have to make some code changes to alter the colors it uses so it's easier to read. Other than that, I didn't make any changes this time around. I'm going to be more cautious than the first time.

If you edited the code to incorporate some of the "ops level" commands (ie: kicks, bans, voicing, etc.), I suggest that you leave the Trivia code alone and add a second (third, fourth, etc.) script to handle these additional tasks.

Unless you are running a very old, very slow machine (ie: 8086 processor with 256M RAM), your bot will be able to handle the multiple scripts very easily.

Actually, I already use separate scripts. I do that to better organize the different bot functions and to make the bot modular. I have 21 different files which contain different scripts. I'm cautious to make sure there's no command overlaps or having different scripts using similar variables.

Oh, I did keep a copy of the non-working trivia game I discovered. I had changed the name of the script file when I modified the script in the past. The current working game is using a different file name as well. This will let me compare scripts in the text editor I use.

I'm using an older laptop for the bot machine. It's a Sony VAIO VGN-FS980. It's got an Intel Pentium M CPU with 1GB of memory and running WinXP Home 32bit. It's not anything big but it runs the bot scripts fine. I keep the version of mIRC up to date on it. The only other things that it runs is a firewall and an anti-virus app that updates itself.