Development of tonbot for Promotion in Telegram Channels

Governance contests Contest Proposals
#1

Background

A combot-type bot with crystal distribution functions will be a “killer-app” for growing the Free TON community and promoting adoption.

Our community can quickly develop a combot-like bot, given the bots I have seen from members like Stanislav, Broxus, PokerTON etc. In my opinion, it would be much better for the Free TON community to develop and control it’s own tonbot vs. crystal distribution through a privately-controlled, 3rd-party bot. This would give the Free TON community and governance control over how tonbot is promoted, what channels it is used in, new features development, analytics collection and use, crystal distribution strategies, and distribution amounts - I think all of these are very important.

I believe it will be easy to convince admins to add tonbot to their cryptocurrency (and many other) channels, given the obvious benefits for the admins and their members. Who would prefer to receive “reputation points” over TON crystals? After one or two popular channels add the tonbot, the rest will follow to remain competitive. After our (friendly) Trojan horse is inside the gates - we can add new win-win ways for the tonbot to support the project and channels (this would not be possible with a 3rd party solution)

Contest: “tonbot” development

Contest dates

  • Warm-up / commenting / contest improvement period: 10 October - 25 October 2020
  • Submission period: 26 October - 18 December 2020??

Short description

Develop a telegram bot similar to combot, with crystal distribution and other creative features that can support the Free TON community and project. The tonbot should not be a combot clone with tokenized reputation - it should have unique and creative features that maximize the promotion and adoption of Free TON and participation in the Free TON community.

Motivation

A combot-type bot with crystal distribution functions will be a “killer-app” for growing the Free TON community and promoting adoption. See background (above) for more.

Evaluation criteria and winning conditions

Hard criteria

  • Final document should be presented in form of white-paper, including an abstract as a preliminary overall description of the system
  • Link to documentation at Github/Gitlab or another open repository, with the obligatory backlink to your submission in the repository’s README
  • Detailed structured documentation for each part of the system
  • Easy to follow instructions for future adopters
  • System must be tested in the community chats and proven to operate reliably

Soft criteria

  • Features and strategies that maximize real user adoption (not just random airdrops etc.)
  • Features and strategies that maximize community growth (promote, inspire, recruit, etc.)
  • Features that minimize scammers and sybil “attacks”
  • Clean UI/UX
  • Competitive features with: Combot
  • Clean code to support future feature additions by other developers

Artifacts

  • Google Doc with the white-paper open for commenting and containing the backlink to the submission.
  • Preferably to use block diagrams, schemes, etc. (if applicable)

Rewards

1 place………………,………… 150,000 TONs
2 place…………………….…… 100,000 TONs
3 place………….……,……,…… 75,000 TONs
4 place……………………,.,…… 50,000 TONs

All legitimate entries will receive at least 50k TONs.

Bonuses:

  • 0.25 TONs for each legitimate new user after deployment (capped at 250,000 TONs)

If no participant will demonstrate a competitive, reliable tonbot, an additional stage of contest may be announced later.

Voting

  • Jury members who vote in this contest must have a solid understanding of the technology. Those jurors who don’t, should not vote or choose “Abstain.”
  • Jurors whose team(s) intend to participate in this contest by providing submissions lose their right to vote in this contest.
  • Each juror will vote by rating each submission on a scale of 1 to 10 or can choose to reject it if it does not meet requirements or choose to abstain from voting if they feel unqualified to judge.
  • Jurors will provide feedback on your submissions.
  • The Jury will reject duplicate, sub-par, incomplete, or inappropriate submissions.

It would also be fun and effective to add the bots to our chats, test for one month, conduct a community poll and add bonus score/points for winner(s)

Jury rewards

An amount equal to 5% of the prize fund will be divided equitably between all jurors who vote and provide feedback based on their votes’ quantity and quality. Both voting and feedback are mandatory to collect this reward.

Procedural reminders to all contestants

  • Accessibility. All submissions must be accessible for the Jury to open and view, so please double-check your submission. If the submission is inaccessible or does not fit the criteria described, jurors may reject the submission.
  • Timing. Contestants must submit their work before the closing of the filing of applications. If not submitted on time, the submission will not count.
  • Contact information. All submissions must contain the contestant’s contact information, preferably a Telegram username by which jurors can verify that the submission belongs to the individual who submitted it. If not, jurors may reject your submission.
  • Content. The content published in the forum and the provided PDF file should not differ, except for formatting. Otherwise, jurors may reject the submission.
  • Well-formed links. If your submission has links to the work performed, the content of those links must have the contestant’s contact details, preferably a Telegram username, so jurors can match it and verify whom the work belongs. If not, jurors may reject your submission.
  • Multiple submissions.
    • Each contestant has the right to provide several submissions if they contain different approaches to the contest problem’s solving. However, if works are not unique enough or differ just in insignificant details, jurors may reject such repeating submissions.
    • If the contestant wants to make an additional submission that overrides the one previously published, he must inform the Jury about this fact and indicate the correct revision to assess. In this case, only the indicated work will count. If the contestant hasn’t indicated the updated submission as the correct one, only the first one will count, the Jury will reject all the others.

Disclaimer

Anyone can participate, but Free TON cannot distribute Tons to US citizens or US entities.

Feedback on This Contest is Strongly Encouraged

Please consider this proposal a draft. Feedback to improve this contest specifications and design are strongly encouraged. Also, if you are not a potential contestant, but have some cool ideas for tonbot post them below.

10 Likes
#2

It looks like a great idea! Thanks!

2 Likes
#3

Well done boys. Very cool!

#4

Excellent competition, ready to get to work!

#5

Good luck in acquiring 10 mln of users. Seems you don’t understand what Combot is.
BTW if you raise the reward to… I don’t know, 500k of TONs we will make such opensourced bot for ya.

2 Likes
#6

I believe finding 10M users that will accept free TON crystals will not be difficult. The challenge is how to distribute crystals in a way that promotes real adoption of Free TON. Randomly giving 1,000,000 Telegram users 2 TONs does not accomplish this, IMO. If something is given for free, especially when not asked for, it implies there is little or no value. When someone on the street hands you a flyer or tissues, do you value it? I think these “unearned” crystals will be converted to selling pressure on exchanges, reducing the value of Free TON’s ecosystem. This is why I think Free TON’s approach to distribution is much better than airdrops: crystals must be earned - this gives them value to the receiver.

This is why I think it would be better to have a bot, similar to combot, but instead of reputation points, users earn “reputation crystals.” This will motivate users to make valuable contributions to the channels to earn crystals (a win-win). (I read your proposal again - you did mention something similar as a potential future feature).

I think combot and Free TON partnership would be very good for both combot and the Free TON community, but I, personally, found many issues with the proposal (in the current form). Some I described above. The others are:

  • random airdrop does not imply value
  • 3,630,000 crystals to bot owner to distribute 2,000,000 crystals to users (this is not efficient distribution.)
  • No long-term deal (what happens after first 1M “users” - discussed above)
  • No open source or community control (Free TON community can not evolve the bot for new ideas and strategies)
  • No abuse protection proposed (incentives of combot and Free TON community are not aligned here)
  • No recognition of benefits/value that Free TON would add to combot (proposal is one-sided, IMO)

I think it would be a good idea for Free TON community to build the tonbot, offer to some popular channels, and then learn from its use. Then features can be modified/added based on results. This is not possible with the combot proposal (main reason I proposed the tonbot).

I do like your idea to build an open source bot (the current 1st place will receive 150+250 = 400k TONs). I was hoping that you would participate in the competition.

I think combot is very cool and would love to see a combot/Free TON partnership. I was very excited by your proposal (but also disappointed by some details/terms, such as 3.6M TON compensation for distributing 2M TONs). Can we collaborate on an alternative partnership proposal that is more win-win and addresses some of the issues above? It should be easy to find a win-win partnership because both parties can benefit greatly from a partnership.

Please also understand that I do not speak for the community, these are only my personal opinions. Only a vote by governance can speak for the community.

[Edit: the proposal was just approved! I hope a reputation reward approach is taken instead of airdrop]

4 Likes
#7

I totally support your opinion! This way is better for our community. To be honest, current partnership proposals look unclear and quite unfair. The main reason why I think so is the huge budgets that the community should allocate. Everyone is asking for an incredible amount of tokens.

1 Like
#8

  1. First of all, looks like you don’t read our proposal.
    Tokenized reputation was proposed at the very end of it as a next step. Everything except it is almost done :slight_smile: TRep is quite complicated task and I agree that it’s something that will be great to see.

  2. Next, about building “tonbot” for airdropping. You don’t need to build another combot for it. Just make a tokenized reputation.

  3. The key point is that you couldn’t acquire 10 mln of telegram users even by airdropping them 10 TONs to every single person, believe me.

2 Likes
#10

Fedor, we are lucky to have you as a partner. Combot will bring a lot of value to Free TON and vice versa. You said you are not an enthusiast, but I hope we will convert you. Free TON is a very special project with very important goals. It is not just another blockchain/coin. Combot could become a very valuable contributor to the community.

#11

Well, if everything is clear about the partnership with Combot, then I take it this contest is no longer relevant?

1 Like
#12

I agree with itakura1 in general.
I do not understand why such important thing (Free Ton <-> Combot) integration was not properly discussed and the proposal was accepted ‘as is’ in 2 days after it’s submission.

If the idea was to make ‘gifts’ to telegram users - that fine, but why it should be done in such strange manner?

The main problem with ‘gifts’ is that they have zero-value for the users and it is not about long-term usage. This is the probably the way to burn this tokens on Chatex and/or other exchanges and no good for the Free TON besides some people ‘get knowledge about it and get some random bucks’.

I think it is a very good idea to partner with Combot (and other leading players), but with other mechanics.

#13

I disagree. Tonbot should be very different (not a combot clone). I use the word “combot-like” only to communicate the way it functions in channels because most people here are familiar with combot. The tonbot should be optimized to promote Free TON adoption and create value/uses for crystals while also providing value to channel admins and members.

Tonbot will be a killer app that is community developed, maintained, and controlled. I think this is very relevant and important. The combot partnership will be great for Free TON, but it shouldn’t prevent us from developing additional bots for the Free TON ecosystem.

2 Likes
#14

We are ready to take on this work, if the contest is held

#15

I wish I took my Bot development course seriously, I would have enrolled in this competition regardless I wouldn’t stoop low not wish the participants a good luck. Thanks for this great competition.

#16

This seems like a good idea. Also, these kinds of campaigns always sound good. With economic budgets, it may be possible to reach more people and a successful campaign can be created. I support such a campaign as an individual user.

#17

The campaign is not that capable of given such idea by learning is proper way

1 Like
#18

Hello. In my opinion the price is very high. There are already several developers making bots in the community.adding functionality to an existing one is not such a difficult task.
The main task of the bot is to gain popularity and so that people trust it.

1 Like
#19

Отличная идея давно пора использовать ПО не только партнёров