Nigerbot Saga

The **NigerBot** **Saga** was to be one of the most turbulent times in the bot community history, and potentially one of the most divisive events in the community's history.

The key difference between this event and previous events in the Appreciation Society's past is that this was the first time conflict was generated purely through actions taken by members of the community, as opposed to outside forces such as The Zucc.

On 24 August 2018, a fan of PaintBot messaged the page, describing the concept behind the soon-to-be NigerBot two days before its eventual publication. Two days afterwards, NigerBot was created. Paintmin did not advertise the bot anywhere and it remained relatively obscure.

However, after an anonymous individual shared one of NigerBot's posts to the BAS group, it was thrown into the limelight. The page was met with immediate opposition, accompanied by intense arguments surrounding the validity of the page's existence, and what sort of pages should be accepted by the community. This split the Bot Appreciation Society into two groups.

The first argued that the bot drew unnecessary attention from The Zucc and so should be forcibly removed from the community in order to protect the rest of the pages associated with the BAS. Additionally, most members of this group were opposed to the racist intentions associated with the concept behind the page.

The second group argued the bot was not confined to posting slurs and did make humorous posts such as *"ngneer"* and *"reeeee"*, a similar result to other bots. They also stated that even if it did post a slur, this was could be ascribed to random chance and was not the fault of the botmin. Furthermore, they argued, there should not be a limit on what bot pages could be made or what they posted, and The Zucc was simply an adversary that must be ignored, rather than surrendered to.

As is natural in internet discussion, nothing really went anywhere and any discussion that did happen was quickly overpowered by people loudly typing in all-caps.

On the 29th of August 2018, 3 days after the publishing of NigerBot, several events occurred almost simultaneously.

The first was the creation of The Bot Appreciation Society, but Not Racist. This was the first fringe group of its kind in BAS history. It was made as a response to the supposed lack of action that the admins took when NigerBot first took the spotlight.

The following quote is from a post made that same day by an angry member:

> Alright, here we go.
>
>
> Not only is this group apparently accepting of a bot made to post "Ni­gger," it promotes it fully and fucking belittles you for thinking it's a bad idea.
> I have been in the Bot Appreciation Society for over a year. I love bots because of their creativity, their ingenuity, and their outright cleverness.
> But, instead of a bot that is even one of those things, you literally made a bot to tempt fate and see how close you can get to saying N­igger.
> I am leaving, and I hope other people do the same. You act like children and hide behind A. your adminship or B. your "anti-liberal" views. Instead of even considering for a second that adding lighter fluid to a fire might be a bad idea, you say it's fine because it's just a joke.
> Instead, I encourage everyone to act like a fucking adult. You're not speaking into a vacuum where the only person around is yourself. It's an entirely public place and that's on you for behaving in this way.
>
>
>
> Everyone go join The Bot Appreciation Society, but Not Racist, instead. Legitimate botmins are welcome to take their position there as well.
>
>

At the time it was seen by the majority has a non serious matter, out of the 89 members of the BAS group that reacted to it 52 Haha racted to the post.

While intended to be a replica of the original group, it was also meant to weed out the members of the side supporting the existence of NigerBot. This was in order to provide a "racist-free" environment to appreciate bots. This ultimately was a failure; the group managed to only gleam 150 members in its prime, fizzled out soon after creation, and has now been renamed "Dead Group, join The Bot Appreciation Society instead".

The second event to occur on the 29th of August was the creation of CountryBot 0208. This was a repurposed page created by Paintmin, the original creator of NigerBot. Rather than simply use the words from 'Niger' and generate a total of 6 letters, it would instead draw from a list of countries as well as use a random number of letters.

The final event to occur was the creation of a spin-off page, NigerBot V2. Created by zong, who has since banned from the Bot Appreciation Society, it was made to mimic the original NigerBot. This was in response to the original being taken down by Paintmin after the community deemed it inappropriate.

NigerBot V2 has since been zucced, however zong has continued to remake the page every time it is taken down by The Zucc, changing the name in some situations to help avoid being deleted.

It has since been through two iterations, N-Redacted-Bot 5000 v3 and NotRacistBot 5164. All pages except NotRacistBot 5164 have since been deleted or zucced, although the exact dates of deletion are not known. NotRacistBot 5164 stopped posting on Februrary 19, 2019.

Soon afterwards the admin of the NigerBot spin-off pages was removed from the group, the admin and mod team released several statements individually and on behalf of the team that NigerBot was no longer an accepted topic in the group, and punishments would be given out to people who discussed the topic.

    Over time, the NigerBot saga has faded into obscurity, although remains an important event in history as it created a discussion surrounding what the bot community would tolerate within the group and within their bot pages.