This is a bot for helping administrate a shared slack channel for the UK Government.
It's pretty damn unofficial, and just automates a few tasks that needed automating. It's maintained by @bruntonspall in his copious spare time and runs on the GOV.UK PaaS
You'll need a few things:
- A slack domain, I use mbs-bot-test as a test channel, feel free to create your own or ask politely for access
- A bot integration
- A legacy api token
Just go to slack.com and create a new slack instance, or ask @bruntonspall nicely to use mbs-bot-test
Now make a bot integration inside of your Slack channel. Go here:
https://my.slack.com/services/new/bot
Enter a name for your bot. Make it something fun and friendly, but avoid a single task specific name. Bots can do lots! Let's not pigeonhole them.
When you click "Add Bot Integration", you are taken to a page where you can add additional details about your bot, like an avatar, as well as customize its name & description. Copy the API token that Slack gives you. You'll need it.
You'll also need a legacy API token, go get one from https://api.slack.com/custom-integrations/legacy-tokens, it should start xoxp
You'll want to run the following command
nodejs token=xoxb-... apitoken=xoxp-... slackdomain=... ./index.js
Your bot should appear on the slack channel and you should be able to interact with him/her/it as expected
On the Cross Government Slack instance, the bot is called michaelbotspall and it's pronouns are it/it's/it's.
It can do two main tasks.
Our slack is limited to UK Government Employees, but slack restricts the number fo domains to just 100, so the bot can issue per user invites. You can simply message it with invite email@address
and it will send an invite, providing the email address is valid.
You can either message the bot direct, or address is in a channel, like @michaelbotspall invite [email protected]
. It will reply in a thread to say it has sent the invite.
Currently invites are only sent to people with email addresses ending .gov.uk
.
Slacks current system allows either everyone to make announcements everywhere, or only the admin to make announcements everywhere.
MichaelBotSpall has the power to make announcements in select channels, simply say, in channel, @michaelbotspall announce some words here
and @michaelbotspall will follow up with @channel some words here (via @bruntonspall)
with your name. This makes the identity of the user explicit and clear.
This is only enabled for certain channels, so to enable it for a new channel, simply say @michaelbotspall channel_announce #general on
and it will enable announcements in #general. To turn announcements off, say @michaelbotspall channel_announce #general off
and it will do so.
MichaelBotSpall has a few other features:
- User roles, simply say
@michaelbotspall set role for @user to admin
to grant admin roles to a user. Only super users can do this, and only admins can toggle channel announcements - Uptime, simply say
@michaelbotspall uptime
and it will tell you how long it has been running - Politeness, simply say
@michaelbotspall hello
and it will say hello back - Name calling, say
@michaelbotspall call me maybe
and it will call youmaybe
when it says hello :)
I'd like to steal some features from https://handbook.18f.gov/slack/ and provide some helpful features in future, such as raising issues on github for documentation, arranging standups, reminders etc.