FRC Facebook Messenger ChatBot 2017 Release

FIRST General Forum
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For those not familiar, the FRC ChatBot is an automated Facebook Messenger bot to help you get instant information about FRC Teams and Events. You can chat with the bot here.

We have been working on lots of improvements recently to make the bot even more helpful. Here is everything you can ask:

Subscribe Team# to receive match notifications for a team
NextMatch Team# to see a team’s next match at an event
Status Team# to receive a team’s stats at their current event
Website Team# to receive a team’s website URL
Nickname Team# to get a team’s full name
Team Page Team# for a team’s TBA page
Picture Year Team# to see a picture of a team’s robot in any given year
Date Year (optional) Event Name to find out the date of an event (if no year is provided, current year is used)

http://i.imgur.com/ytV9hfBm.png](https://www.messenger.com/t/FRCBot)

Click here to start chatting now!

We hope this bot is useful to your for quick access to information during and around event time! The main developer is not on Chief and English is not his first language so if you have any questions or bugs, feel free to ask here and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Interested in being a developer? Check out the open source project in the GitHub Repo.

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FYI - No need to use the asterisks when writing to the bot. It’ll still work but not necessary.

Writing

Nickname 1836

and

Nickname *1836*

will both yield

Team 1836's nickname is The MilkenKnights
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Worked well for me – are you getting data from TBA – I’m guessing so assuming that is where pictures are coming from?

How does the process to deploy the code work? I had before build season toyed with the idea of a Messenger bot (as a sort of website replacement/complement) but was testing Chatfuel (which is code-less). I like the idea of putting it in a repo and having more control there, but the other way is real simple for non-programmers and to deploy.

4

The process is a little bit involved because you need to first create a Facebook Page (if you don’t already have one) and then enroll as a developer. All of this is fairly easy but still takes some time and effort.

If you want more specific info, let me know and I’ll pass it on to the main developer.

5

Hey ngreen! Starting a Chat Bot on messenger is really easy. I created a Github repo and then I bought a domain name and a hosting plan to host the php files that my bots use.

First, I watched online tutorials on how to create Facebook Bots in php. After the first youtube video, my framework was done and I did the rest by myself. FRC bot uses The Blue Alliance API to get his informations.

If you want to take a look at the code, you can go to: https://github.com/FRC-Bot/FRCBot-ChatBot

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