Announcing the Unofficial TBA Slack Bot Closed Beta

[bdaroz]

The Programming Group of FRC 5881, the Tech Valley High School Dragons, is proud to announce the closed beta for our Unofficial TBA Slack Bot!

The bot is currently able to look up team information, details, and competition statuses either via direct messages, or conversationally in a channel. It is also able to follow teams at competition and notify the channel of updates.

Currently the request/response commands are fairly complete and just need more testing. Following teams is "probably" working, but without both testers and events, who knows what's broken?

Teams interested in testing during the closed beta are encouraged to sign up here: https://goo.gl/forms/8CQSZLDkNhMy6j3J2

If you request access, you must be a Slack Team admin, or have permissions to install Slack Apps. As the bot is currently being hosted on a testing/development server (until open beta), you will be asked to keep setup information and instructions confidential. (Also helps from getting too many testers.) Finally, you will be asked to report any problems timely so we may fix them.

Priority will be given to those teams competing in upcoming events, as well as those teams looking to follow a team in an upcoming offseason event. (This is to facilitate testing.)

A quick example of some of the interaction in a direct message:
http://i.imgur.com/yqqrpFy.png

[plnyyanks]

Nice stuff!

How did you implement the following teams bit? Are you using webhooks, or just polling?

[bdaroz]

Originally Posted by plnyyanks

Nice stuff!

How did you implement the following teams bit? Are you using webhooks, or just polling?

Thanks,

The bot uses hooks on both side of the Slack <-> Bot <-> TBA side to be a "good neighbor". On the Slack side that's their Event API, and Webhooks on TBA. In addition we added the basic TBA cache (If-Modified-Since) header and on top of that added an adjustable "don't even bother asking" cache to try to keep the calls to TBA somewhat reasonable.

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by bdaroz

Thanks,

The bot uses hooks on both side of the Slack <-> Bot <-> TBA side to be a "good neighbor". On the Slack side that's their Event API, and Webhooks on TBA. In addition we added the basic TBA cache (If-Modified-Since) header and on top of that added an adjustable "don't even bother asking" cache to try to keep the calls to TBA somewhat reasonable.

Awesome! I always love to hear about cool uses people come up with for webhooks.

Thanks for trying to keep your API calls down also

[Sperkowsky]

I applied for the F4 slack. I had to fill in the form really oddly to make it work. Hopefully we get it on the slack soon it seems really cool.

[bdaroz]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

I applied for the F4 slack. I had to fill in the form really oddly to make it work. Hopefully we get it on the slack soon it seems really cool.

I saw that!

My first thought after, "There's a team 1?" was seeing the number of teams you'd like to follow.

We've got some great feedback from the first few testers and we're going to make some changes before we bring in the next set, perhaps mid-week.

[bdaroz]

Thanks everyone for your feedback, and eagerness to play with our Slack bot.

We have 7 teams live with the bot right now and have a good mix of public and private channels the bot is communicating with. In addition, a good number of teams have been subscribed to, so we're ready for testing this weekend.

We've quashed a few bugs along the way (uh teams, URLs have 2 slashes, not 3. That's at least a few dozen of you so far... and boy does Slack not like that....), and are working on getting feedback about some UX changes in the way some information is presented.

Once we know which way we're going to go with that, we'll be inviting our next batch of teams, perhaps as soon as tonight, if not tomorrow. If you requested to test before noon today (Eastern time) and listed an offseason event you'll be attending, you should receive an invite in the next round. If you didn't list an offseason event, and signed up before noon today, expect an invite after this weekend's offseason events.

If you signed up after noon today, don't despair, we just want to see how the weekend goes.

[frcguy]

Looks awesome so far! I especially like the responses that say "according to this punch card" .

[bdaroz]

Originally Posted by frcguy

Looks awesome so far! I especially like the responses that say "according to this punch card" .

Thanks! You'll really enjoy today's updated then. Ask the bot for help changelog for details.

In other news, we've sent out another batch of invites more than doubling the number of teams. If you haven't heard from us yet, we plan to invite everyone who's signed up so far on Sunday.

[bdaroz]

So... we've had some great feedback the last 2 days, and we're gaining confidence in our readiness for this weekend....

... So...

If you already signed up for the closed beta, we went all Oprah on the list. You've all got an invite in your mailbox.

If you didn't get an email, but signed up, PM me with your team number and name you signed up with, and I'll resend via a PM.

Enjoy!!

[chuteDoor]

I would like to thank you on behalf of the 1619 strategy team, who will be using this bot over the course of next year's competition season.

It looks awesome!