obliquebot returns

Some time back, when beepboop.com was still around, I wrote a little Slack bot that listened for “oblique” or “strategy” in the channels it had been invited to, and popped out one of Eno’s Oblique Strategies when it heard its keywords or was addressed directly.

It worked fine up until the day that BeepBoop announced that they were going away, and eventually obliquebot stopped working.

This month, I decided that I would stop ignoring the “you have a security issue in your code” notifications from GitHub, and try catching obliquebot up with the new version of the SLAPP library that I’d used to get Spud, the RadioSpiral.net “who’s on and what’s playing” robot back online.

I went through all the package upgrades and then copied the code from Spud over to the obliquebot checkout. The code was substantially the same; both are bots that listen to channels and respond, without doing any complex interaction. I needed to add the code to load the strategies from a YAML file and to select and print one, but the code was mostly the same.

I also needed to update the authentication page to show the obliquebot icon instead of the RadioSpiral one, and to set the OAuth callback link to the one supplied by Slack.

Once I had all that in place, I spent a good two or three hours trying to figure out why I could build the code on Heroku, but not get it to run. I finally figured out that I had physically turned off the dyno, and that it wasn’t going to do anything until I tuned it back on again.

obliquebot is now running again at RadioSpiral and the Disquiet Junto Slack, and I’ve updated the README at the code’s GitHub page to outline all the steps one needs to take it and build one’s own simple request-response bot.