Hi,
We had some issues recently with different users not being able to correctly verify motion hashes. It seems that different browser/OS combinations treat the text coming from this website differently to each other and this was causing the checked hashes to return different values to the original.
This prompted me to build a browser independent tool for both formatting and verifying motions and their hashes. The tool is the Assistant bot which also has some other functions around this forum.
To use Assistant to format a motion, send a PM to @assistant. the first two words of the message should be ‘motion hash’. Any other text in the message will be treated as the motion text and will be formatted into a standard motion.
eg. motion hash this is my motion
Once correctly formatted, Assistant will calculate the RIPEMD160 hash of the motion text and will reply to your PM with the text for your post.
To copy that text you need to click the ‘Verify’ link towards the bottom of Assistant reply. This shows you the raw text that was hashed. If you paste that raw text, in it’s entirety, into your post, it will appear nicely formatted as it did in Assistant reply.
If you don’t copy the raw ‘verify’ text, your post won’t be nicely formatted and the verification text will fail the hash if any one checks.
Assistant adds some hidden html tags to the formatted motion which will allow future tools to easily access information.
To verify a motion hash, reply to a motion post, mention Assistant and follow immediately with the word ‘verify’. Assistant will scan the entire thread for any motions and re-calculate the hash on each. This provides a nice, easy way to verify that a motions text hasn’t changed and that you are voting for the correct thing in your Nu client.
I hope Assistant becomes useful. It will certainly help some beneficial development ideas I have to ensure that future motions are all in the same format.