Bots on the NZ Mesh

A bot is an automated node that replies without a human involved. Used well, bots make the mesh easier to test and give people early warning of things that matter. Used badly, they are airtime nobody asked for - on a shared, limited-bandwidth medium that cost is paid by everyone in range.

New Zealand runs two kinds:

Kind	What it does	Where it lives
Ping & path bots	Reply to a trigger word with the path your message took to reach it	#testing
CAP alert bots	Relay official alerts from MetService, Civil Defence and similar	Dedicated channel - to be decided

Anything else is not an established pattern on the national mesh. Talk to the community first.

The rules

These apply to every bot, of every kind.

• Don’t crowd a region. A region can run a path bot, a CAP bot, a weather bot, and more than one path bot where the coverage earns it - four path bots to a region is about the practical limit. Each one needs a trigger nobody else is using and a listing on its page saying where it is and who runs it. Check what already exists before you deploy.
• Ask before you deploy. Raise it in the Discord or the Facebook group first. Coordination is the whole point - see Etiquette.
• Stay on the dedicated channel. Ping and path bots belong in #testing. Never automate on the Public channel without community consensus.
• Something has to trigger it. A message, an alert feed, or a schedule are all legitimate triggers - a path bot answers a message, a CAP bot answers a feed, a regional weather bot can run to a clock. What is not legitimate is a bot talking on a channel that did not ask for it. Anything that speaks unprompted needs a channel set up for it, and putting it on a standard channel takes full community consensus.
• One short reply per trigger. Everything the sender needs in a single message.
• Remember that every channel message floods. A channel message has no single destination, so it cannot be path-routed - it goes out flood and every repeater that hears it rebroadcasts it. That is the real cost behind the rule above: a bot that answers twice has flooded the mesh twice. Where a bot does send a direct message, use a specific path rather than flood.
• Human communications take priority. If your bot is competing with people talking to each other, your bot is wrong.

Tip

Running something just for yourself? Use your own channel. If it takes up much airtime, move it to another frequency.

Running one well

Bots are nodes, so Etiquette applies: an accurate location and a unique hex prefix. Naming is where they differ - a repeater wants a descriptive name, a bot wants a short one.

• Keep the name short. A node name is transmitted, so every character costs airtime. The trigger word alone (wre) or the trigger plus bot (Wre Bot) is plenty - people already know where it is from the code. Wre Bot Whangarei is wasted bytes.
• Keep it up. A bot that answers half the time teaches people the wrong thing about their link quality.
• Keep firmware and bot software current, and watch what it actually sends - a loop that retries on failure can saturate a channel fast.
• Say who runs it. When it misbehaves, people need to know who to tell.

Software

The technology doesn’t matter. Following the pattern does - see Ping & path bots for the exact message format.

What people run in New Zealand:

Software	Notes
OwlShack	Runs companion and repeater nodes; auto-responders live on its Bots page
meshcore-ha	Home Assistant integration; bots are built as HA automations
Custom code	Several regions run their own

Note

Community stub - running something that isn’t listed? Add it.