Jarvis now supports tell topics, which are basically a way to send a tell to a group of people. This is how they work:
!tell @topic here is some text you want to send.
The "@" character is used to differentiate between a topic and a user with the same name.
If you want to receive tells sent to a topic, you the !subscribe command:
!sub @topic
This should be useful to let people send messages to specific staff teams, e.g. licensing or admins.
If you want to prevent random people from subscribing to a topic, you can !restrict it. From then on, only people inside SSSC will be able to subscribe to it. You also need to be in SSSC to restrict it in the first place.
There is no way to limit topic subscriber further than based on their access to SSSC. Restricted topics should not be confused for a secure private communication channel. They are more like delayed pings.
There is no way to see who is subscribed to a topic. This is intentional. For this reason, !notdelivered and !purgetells commands will not work with topics. All tells sent to a topic are final. You will be informed of the total number of subscribers each time you send a tell to it.
You can use the !topics command to see all the topics you're currently subscribed to.
Since !tell is the only command in which a topic can be mistaken with a user, it is also the only command for which the "@" character is mandatory. For all other commands, it can be dropped. "!sub @topic" is thus equivalent to "!sub topic".
I'm going to hold of announcing it in #19 for a couple of days to give staff time to restrict the topics they want to restrict. After that, it's free for all.
The full list of all topic-associated commands:
!tell @<topic> <message>
!subscribe <topic>
!unsubscribe <topic>
!restrict <topic>
!unrestrict <topic>
!topics
kaktus is the one who originally came up with the idea, so he deserves half the praise.