ContributeBot

[Paul McLanahan]

Hi All,

I was inspired recently by a poster presentation at PyCon US about
WelcomeBot [0] to build an IRC bot that would welcome new channel
members based on info in the project's contribute.json [1] file. This
bot now exists and is called "contributebot" [2]. The bot's primary
features are as follows:

* Give it a URL to a contribute.json file, and it will join the IRC
channel listed in the file, and idle quietly learning the nicks of the
regular users.
* Once it's ready (I'd give it a week or so) you can say
"contributebot: welcoming approved", and it'll start watching for new
users.
* When it sees a new user, it will wait for 10 minutes and if in that
time no one else in the channel says anything it will greet the user
with info about project leads and links to issues it got from the
contribute.json file.
* If multiple new users join within the 10 minute window, it will only
greet once, but mention all of the new users.
* It keeps a list of all nicks it's seen including nick changes, and
will not bother them on rejoin.

The creation and adoption of this bot is an official q2 goal of mine.
I'd very much appreciate any feedback [3] on anything from how well it
does what it's supposed to, to whether it's worthwhile at all.

If you have a contribute.json file for your project and would like to
try contributebot, just ping me (pmac) in #webdev or in a PM.

Thanks,

pmac

[0] https://github.com/shaunagm/WelcomeBot
[1] http://contribute-json.herokuapp.com/
[2] https://github.com/pmclanahan/hubot-contributejson
[3] https://github.com/pmclanahan/hubot-contributejson/issues/new

--
Paul [pmac] McLanahan
Sr. Web Developer @ Mozilla
http://pmac.io

[Bob Silverberg]

Hi pmac,

We (Web QA) are looking at updating our irc bot and are looking at using
Hubot as well. I like a lot of the things you've done with
contributebot, but the one way that it doesn't fit in with what we need
is that it's based on a contribute.json file, whereas we have a channel
that supports all of our projects, most of which do not have
contribute.json files. I realize that the whole contribute.json thing is
the raison d'être of contributebot, but I'm wondering if it would make
sense to decouple the resuable features (e.g., keeping track of channel
users and greeting only those who are new after 10 minutes of
inactivity) from the parts of it that are contribute.json specific.
Maybe two (or more) different hubot scripts?

Perhaps we can chat about this a bit in Whistler?

Cheers,
Bob

[Paul McLanahan]

We should chat for sure. Short answer is that nothing prevents you from
creating a contribute.json file for your group and hosting it somewhere. I
put a test file up on people.m.o. All that's required is a url to a json
file with the correct schema.