Overview

A crash, a corrupted character, and a lurking split edge case — all disarmed. Then five new spells: a Partyline persona inspector, persistent karma history, and five test cases locking it all down.

“Expelliarmus Maxima II! The crash yields. The em dash surrenders. The operators take their seats.” 🏰⚡

🔴 B19 — _seconds_to_human() Was Missing (Crash on !karmahist)

Severity: CRITICAL — mbKarmaHist_ctx called _seconds_to_human() to format the “ago” timestamp on each karma entry. The function was never defined — every !karmahist call crashed immediately with Undefined subroutine &Mediabot::UserCommands::_seconds_to_human.

Fix: added the function to UserCommands.pm:

# B19/fix: was missing, caused crash in mbKarmaHist_ctx
sub _seconds_to_human {
    my ($secs) = @_;
    $secs = int($secs // 0);
    return '0s' unless $secs > 0;
    my $d = int($secs / 86400); ...
    return "${d}d ${h}h" if $d;
    return "${h}h ${m}m" if $h;
    return "${m}m ${s}s" if $m;
    return "${s}s";
}

Output examples: 3d 2h, 14m 7s, 42s.

🟠 B17 — Em Dash in botNotice (Non-ASCII)

External.pm:3238 contained a Unicode em dash (—, U+2014) inside a single-quoted string passed to botNotice:

# Before — Unicode em dash, may corrupt on non-UTF-8 IRC links
'Persona cleared — using default system prompt.'

# After — ASCII only
'Persona cleared -- using default system prompt.'  # B17/fix: ASCII only

🟡 B20 — split /\x00/, $key Without Limit

_cmd_quota split rate-limit keys on \x00 without a count limit. A key with an unexpected second \x00 would silently produce three fields, corrupting the channel name display.

# Before
my ($nick_k, $chan_k) = split /\x00/, $key;

# After — B20/fix
my ($nick_k, $chan_k) = split /\x00/, $key, 2;

Four occurrences fixed across _cmd_quota.

🎭 I7 — Partyline .persona [nick]

Operators can now inspect and manage Claude personas directly from the Partyline.

Without argument — list all active personas:

.persona
Active Claude personas:
  teuk            #boulets     Tu es un pirate des Caraïbes...
  Boole           #teuk        You are a Unix wizard who speaks...

With nick — show persona for that nick:

.persona teuk
Persona(s) for teuk:
  [#boulets] Tu es un pirate des Caraïbes. Réponds en argot nautique.

With clear — remove persona:

.persona teuk clear
Persona cleared for teuk (1 entry).

All split /\x00/ calls use limit 2. Listed in .help.

💾 I8 — !karmahist DB Persistence (Graceful)

processKarma now writes each karma change to KARMA_LOG in addition to the in-memory ring buffer. mbKarmaHist_ctx reads from DB first, falling back to memory if the table doesn’t exist yet.

SQL schema to activate:

CREATE TABLE KARMA_LOG (
    id         INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    id_channel INT NOT NULL,
    nick       VARCHAR(64) NOT NULL,
    delta      TINYINT NOT NULL,
    from_nick  VARCHAR(64) NOT NULL,
    score      INT NOT NULL,
    ts         DATETIME DEFAULT NOW(),
    INDEX (id_channel, ts)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

Without the table, the bot continues working exactly as before — the eval {} wrapper silently absorbs the error.

🧪 T3+ — Five New Tests (237–241)

Total test suite: 228 cases.

📦 Files Changed