I think after parsing saints in our books you can just chart the "last time here" and visually come to one or various natural thresholds.

Edit

If I were you I'd put the whole table into an extra module which is imported by chatterbot and updated once per week.

The threshold for greetings depends on frequency, at some point people might get annoyed by too many of them.

I'd start with 6 or 12 month and would adjust those settings later.

I did some number crunching, to try to come up with something like $NORM for absence time. It turns out that there really isn't one. A human-factors approach is probably better. For you personally, after how long of an absence would you appreciate a "welcome back" message? I think for me it would be 12 months. Someone create a poll.

> something like $NORM for absence time.

I'd probably change the perspective.

How many public "Welcome back" messages per year are too much to tolerate or too little to be noticed?

Edit

We'll only know for sure after trying it out...

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

12 months sounds good to me.

BTW, the whole thing runs on a big PostgreSQL database, since it uses my PageCamel framework i also use to make other personal and commercial projects (created the whole thing from scratch since 2008; concepts and pre-projects go back to 2003 or so). There's no need to "create extra modules", this is something a little bit of re-used database magic and recycling of existing framework code can easily accomplish 😁. If, against all odds, the pagecamel framework doesn't have it, i can usually fish out something from the vast library(*) of my past and present projects.

---

(*)

$ du -hs src/private_mercurial
31G    src/private_mercurial
[download]

PerlMonks XP is useless? Not anymore: XPD - Do more with your PerlMonks XP
Also check out my sisters artwork and my rather simple sketches/one-panel comics