Anyone have experience with Slack bots?

jstrout

Does anyone here have experience creating Slack bots? I'm pondering ways to provide easy access to doing this in MiniScript, and would love to kick ideas around with somebody more experienced than myself.

SynapticBytes

Least helpful reply of all time.... no idea, sorry 🤭

jstrout

Well, just to not be cryptic, here's what I was kicking around this weekend.

I'm trying to make a system that will allow anyone to easily code up a Slack or Discord bot, in MiniScript, by hosting the code wherever they like, such as at PasteBin or GitHub or whatever. For example:

You have to add MiniScript Bots to your server, but then you can create new specific commands using the !addbot command. In the example above, !addbot spam https://pastebin.com/raw/6q9EfR5B adds a new !spam command, which links to this code:

print "Spam, spam, spam, " + message + ", and spam."

And thereafter, you (or anyone in that Slack/Discord server) can just say !spam baked beans or whatever to run the code.

Here's an example of essentially the same functionality (but using different MiniScript code) in Discord:

There are a few other tricks under consideration, like a built-in !eval command that evaluates a MiniScript expression, and prints the result... handy for quick computations or whatever:

(Sorry for the giant images... that's what happens when you screen-capture from a Retina display.)

I got inspired on this idea by a gaming session I'm doing with some out-of-state friends. We have a Slack server set up for the game, and we need to roll a lot of dice in various combinations (yes, it's D&D!). We found a dice-bot that does an OK job, but not a great job for our needs — and I started dreaming about how if we could easily access MiniScript in our Slack chat, we could make our own game tools that are perfect for us.

Usually to create a custom Slack or a Discord bot, you have to have your own server, and jump through a fair number of hoops to install the necessary Python (or whatever) libraries, keep the process running, etc. I want to eliminate all that by providing this generic "MiniScript Bots" bot, that can run whatever code you give it, and let you easily update that code on the fly, as often as you like.

So that's the big idea. Feedback (and intrepid alpha-testers) are very welcome, as always!

SynapticBytes

It does sounds like a good idea. Any thoughts on preventing malicious code?

I actually purchased several rulesets for skirmish/tactical wargames/solo adventure type games a few of years ago when my kids were still at home, in the hopes we could build family ties with some tabletop gaming. I also have a couple dozen board games at the same time, most unopened still, as my attempts never stuck as computer games just had too great a hold on them. But I digress a little.

Why I bring this is is your reference to dice rolling. Just this weekend (since I'm still on War Game Valuts mailing list) I bought a couple more basic rulesets that were on sale cheap, with the thought of maybe coding up the ruleset into a playable game, or at least a helper if anyone else wanted to play these rulesets without needing to do all the dice rolling and table looking-up. Off the top of my head, this may be something these bots could be useful for. I'll give it some thought.

Russell.

jstrout

It does sounds like a good idea. Any thoughts on preventing malicious code?

Yes, that's a really good question. On Discord, I think we can just find out if the user has admin status on that particular server, and so we could restrict code-changing commands (i.e. !addbot) to them. In some groups this would mean Tom saying "Hey Bill, can you !addbot this new command for me," but it seems like a decent enough solution.

On Slack, I don't think there is such a concept of admin users, so we might need something else there. Still mulling that one over.

But yeah, for simple rulesets like what you describe, particularly if you have a group that's meeting online through Slack or Discord anyway, this would be a fun and easy way to build those tools. On the other hand, if you're going to sit around a table, it might be better to build it in Mini Micro and play it on a laptop, since then you could make use of graphics and sounds for greater gee-whiz factor, multiple gamepads to let everybody interact with it at once, etc.