punbot

A bot for Zulip that makes ridiculous puns.

Zulip commands

• **@ pun bot** help (or PM help to pun bot) - displays help text
• **@ pun bot** shut up or **@ pun bot** go away - bans pun bot from the current topic (not to be confused with the current thread)
• **@ pun bot** come back - un-bans punbot from the current topic
• **@ pun bot** more pun - increases pun frequency
• **@ pun bot** less pun - decreases pun frequency
• **@ pun bot** pun me - returns a pun

Fiddly bits

Change PUN_CHANCE to any value between 0 and 1 to change the frequency with which pun bot puns (e.g. a value of .3 means if presented with a punnable message, pun bot puns 30% of the time). Note that pun bot will always pun on anything sent to it via PM.

I want my own pun bot!

1. make a Zulip bot
2. make its API key an evironmental variable (so that the API key isn't floating around on the interwebs)
   • from terminal, run export punbot_api_key=[api key goes here]
   • if using Heroku to host, you'll need to set this in the Heroku environment too: from terminal, run `heroku config:set punbot_api_key=[api key goes here]
   • consider putting a file (I called mine environ) in your project director and also in your .gitignore. It should contain only "export punbot_api_key=[api key goes here]". (Run echo export punbot_api_key=[api key goes here] > environ.) Then you can run source environ from terminal to automatically set that environment variable locally.
3. subscribe it to any streams you want it to haunt (via your own Subscriptions page)
4. adjust pun frequency if desired
5. run the script on your machine or on Heroku
6. ????
7. Profit!

(If anyone figures out what step 6 involves, please let me know.)

Punbot in Action

Good old-fashioned punning:

Punbot crashing someone else's blog test, and **@ pun bot** go away in action: