Public Lab Research note


Call for plotsbot behaviors

by ryzokuken | August 18, 2017 18:20 18 Aug 18:20 | #14768 | #14768

Due to my recent work on the publiclab API, all users can now make comments on the website by making a simple POST request. This feature is exciting because it allows us to program plotsbot, our cute little internal chatbot to post comments on the publiclab.org website.

This allows us to program the bot to do repetitive tasks on the publiclab.org website, freeing the community members who have been hitherto performing these.

I ask the community to propose ideas that can make use of this functionality and make everyone's lives easier inside the comments for this note. I will try my best to implement all of those in plotsbot.

Eg: Make the bot comment a predefined generic support message onto a research note with id $id by sending the bot the message - plotsbot support $id


10 Comments

@liz @stevie @warren Let the games begin :P :D

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Hi, @ryzokuken! I wanted to re-propose the idea of periodically (daily) looking at recent questions:

https://publiclab.org/tag/question:*.json

...and if they haven't been responded to in more than a day, offer to help by adding tags, alerting some organizers by email, or something? @liz have ideas on what next steps could be?

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@warren for that, we might need a completely different class of behaviors. I also proposed this on a GitHub issue. Let us please discuss this and I would love to implement this behavior next.

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Can you link us to the Github issue, please?

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Is it this one? https://github.com/publiclab/plotsbot/issues/55 about a new class called daemons?

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So every 2 hours it might read recent questions. Could we call the class scheduled behaviors?

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So after the Open Call, we had a few behavior ideas that could use a scheduled behavior:

**Tagging Bot** "I see this is a question about 'balloon mapping' -- would you like me to try to reach out to some people who've offered to help on this topic?" - ensure the bot hasn't already left this message - leave this only if the question hasn't been answered for a day **Tagging Bot** "Would you say this post is most about ____? Click here to tag it to make it visible to more people following that topic." **Recruiting answerers Bot** (JW) Look at recent posts. If someone has posted more than once on a given tagname/topic "particulate-matter" -- Bot: "Hi, I noticed you've posted twice now about 'particulate-matter'. People often come to Public Lab asking about that. If you're able to help answer questions about it, click here, and we'll send you an email if someone asks about 'particulate-matter' in the future. 3 other people have already agreed to help." - ensure they're not already signed up this way. The link would be https://publiclab.org/subscribe/tag/question:balloon-mapping for example - ensure the bot hasn't already left this message

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@warren Sounds awesome! I will try to tackle each of these one by one.

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Also, because now we're also ensuring everywhere that the bot only sends a particular message once, we probably should switch to a real database now instead of normal variables.

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Great call yesterday, thanks @ryzokuken and everyone!

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