Trigger reply from bot account

support
1

I was interested in better utilizing the system account and I wanted to know if there was possibly a way to automate system account replies. Is there a way to post something, or even tag @system, and have the account automatically post a predetermined response?

Example:

Dwalus:
@system help

system:
posts a list of basic discourse information

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2

No such system currently exists. That is more like a bot, something you would see in chat.

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3

I believe they’ve done such a bot over at http://what.thedailywtf.com (cc. @riking who might know the name of the repo)

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This is the repo for a bot framework:

https://github.com/SockDrawer/SockBot

Requires username/password authentication, which is incompatible with the @system account. I recommend creating a separate account given moderator for this purpose.

However,

NOTA BENE

SockBot is designed for educational purposes, and is not intended to be used on typical production forums. It is also designed as an experiment of what can be automated within Discourse, and is generally targeted directly at what.thedailywtf.com.

This bot should not be used without the forum owners consent, and any use of this bot should be immediately discontinued at the request of the forum owners or moderators. SockBot is not intended for any ill purposes, and the designers of SockBot can not be held liable for abuses of the technology, or any software derived from it.

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5

Wow, this is great. Thanks. It’s all okay, as I happen to have a second system account anyway.

I run a small forum of my own, so it’s fine from that aspect.

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Glad you like it :slight_smile: Feel free to add feature requests to the issues page of the repo if you find something you wish you had, we’re still actively developing the bot framework.

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7

Yes, as @riking and @zogstrip mention there is a bot for that.

a couple of things to mention, the bot is rather specialized and more than a little obscure to set up.

one of the things you’ll need is a config file, and the format is not documented at the moment.

here’s one i prepared earlier:

{
    "username": "This is where the username goes",
    "password": "This is where the password goes",
    "url": "https://your.forum.url.com",
    "modules": {
        "Summoner": {
            "enabled":true
        }
    },
    "admin": {
        "owner": "Dwalus",
        "ignore": []
    }
}

other than the obvious username/password/url keys a few things are important to recognize, for one thing the owner setting. that sets who the bot considers its owner. if you don’t set that the default value is accalia

This config file enables the Summoner module It’s a pretty simple module that responds to @mentions with a randomly selected phrase. depending on how inteligent you want the bot to be about the responses it may be sufficient just to specify a single response in the config file with your canned response.

alternatively you could make the bot more responsive by making it respond inteligently to summons based on the summon text. That’s not functionality that’s currently implemented but we;d be happy to help you implement it, or if you are less developerish you can open an feature request and we’ll do what we can to implement it ASAP.

I’m currently working on a rewrite that will foxfix a lot of the issues that arise from flaws in the current architecture, but the rewrite is very feature poor at the moment. The rewrite will almost certainly be incompatible with the current version but there will be upgrade documentation and we’ll be happy to help you out with any issues.

If you go forward with utilizing the bot please feel free to ping me here with questions or any of the SockDrawer developers on https://what.thedailywtf.com (Myself, RaceProUk, Onyx, Yamikuronue, and TwelveBaud) I promise none of us bite, but static cling may be an issue :wink:

because we’re the Sock Drawer! :rofl:

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