OH-Bot

The Discord Office Hour Butler

Purpose • Overview • Quick Start • Docs • License

Purpose

With the need for online learning becoming increasingly higher, efficient means of reaching educators has become extremely important. We implemented a discord bot to help instructors automate the process of their Office Hours through Discord.

We created this bot with the goal of allowing students to effectively communicate with their instructors, with the option to be able to ask their peers for help while they wait.

Overview

OH-Bot is a server managment automation bot. This means that tasks like notifying and moving students when they are ready to been seen are handled by OH-Bot

OH-Bot is a self-hotsted bot - meaning that you will need to host and maintain your own instance. See Quick Start to get started.

The standard OH-Session protocol that we follow:

1. Instructors Opens OH-Queue
2. Students enter queue and enter waiting room
3. Instructors dequeue students
4. Instructors close queue when OH-Session is over

Waiting Queue System

OH-Bot implements a simple first come first serve queue where student are allowed to enter and leave the queue whenever they like while OH is being held.

Server Template

OH-Bot makes use of Discord’s Server Template feature

There are three roles in the OH-Bot server

• Admin - total control of bot functionality and server interfaces
• Instructor - control over OH sessions and locked channels
• Student - ability to interface with OH-Queue

Commands

OH-Bot commands have access level based on sender roles

• /open - Access Role: [Admin, Instructor]
  • Open the OH-queue for students to join using /eq
• /close - Access Role: [Admin, Instructor]
  • Close the OH-queue, stop students from entering the queue
  • Students that were in the queue before closing will still be regisitered for OH
• /clear /cq - Access Role: [Admin, Instructor]
  • Empties the OH-queue of students
• /enterqueue /eq - Access Role: [Admin, Instructor, Student]
  • Enter sender into the OH-queue
• /leavequeue /lq - Access Role: [Admin, Instructor, Student]
  • Removes sender from the OH-queue
• /dequeue /dq - Access Role: [Admin, Instructor, Student]
  • Removes next student from the queue and moves them into the voice channel the sender is currently connected to.
  • Removes self from queue if student.
• /help - Access Role: [Admin, Instructor]
  • Sends a DM to the sender containing the above commands and their behavior relative to sender access level

Requirements

• Git (Optional if using packaged release)
• Python 3.7 (or higher)
  • Pip
• Discord app & account

Quick Start

Instantiate an instance of the server Template in Discord

Follow discord.py docs on creating and adding a bot to your server.

Clone the source code

git clone https://github.com/ECS-OH-Bot/OH-Bot/tree/master && cd OH-Bot

Follow the instructions here for obtaining a token for your instance of the Bot

Run the setup script

./setup.sh --name {ENV_FILE_NAME}

Adjust the role hierarchy.

For security/privacy purposes, bot/scripts are not allowed to adjust themselves upward the role hierarchy. This must be done by hand to allow features of the bot.

Run the script to start up the bot

./run{ENV_FILE_NAME}.sh

Docs

License

Released under the GNU GPL v3 license.

Copyright (C) 2020 Grant Gilson, Noah Rose Ledesma, Stephen Ott