Documentation Bot for IRC

[akatch]

Proposal: Documentation Bot for IRC

Author: Ally Bowles <@akatch>

Date: 2016/12/20

• Status: New
• Proposal type: process
• Estimated time to implement: Uncertain

Motivation

Frequent users of #ansible have noticed that in many cases, users with questions just need to be pointed to the right documentation page. This often means that someone who wants to help must locate and link to the documentation page. Usually the correct topic is easily searchable, but it would be vastly more efficient to instead issue a command to an IRC bot and get a documentation link back. Additionally, common topics that require only a brief explanation might be available as canned command responses, allowing us to provide more consistent advice to users.

Problems

What problems exist that this proposal will solve?

• Helping users can be inefficient when the person helping has to track down the correct documentation page
• Answers to user questions can occasionally be inconsistent, depending on who is answering and whether something has changed recently

Solution proposal

Many software-related IRC channels have documentation bots that provide the correct documentation link given key words. One excellent example of this is the #nginx channel on Freenode - their bot provides documentation links, canned responses, and even a paste site that automatically links directly to the channel upon upload. This makes it very easy to give standardized, detailed answers to new users who many have a lot of the same questions. It negates the need for a user providing support to have to hunt down the correct documentation page and instead simply issue a command that returns a documentation link or canned response directly to the user asking the question.

Dependencies (optional)

• Mapping of documentation topics to URLs as discussed in the 2016/12/20 Core Team meeting
• Infrastructure on which to host the bot

Testing (optional)

We will want to verify that user-issued commands work as expected

Documentation (optional)

Yes - the bot should have a "help" command that sends a private message to the requesting user containing usage documentation.

Anything else?

Our discussion in the 2016/12/20 Core meeting suggested that the bot's code should/would be public to facilitate community PRs.

[gundalow]

Discussed 20170105 in Testing Working Group Meeting

• Start with !doc which will search docs.ansible.com via the API wehave
• Remove every other functionality apart from !doc and !help
• Initially we accept allanice001 offer to host this while we see how useful it is. After that we can look at moving it to Ansible Infastructure

[allanice001]

AnsiBot is currently live in #ansible-devel, and has 4 commands

• !help -- Shows what commands are avaible
• !about -- point people to Request from Joshua Conner to remove as docker maintainer community#48 for commenting

the next two commands do the same thing (possible split later if we can call the api directly)

• !doc -- Not listed in the help, as it is an alias
• !search -- Creates a url string to http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/#stq={{ query_text }}

[gundalow]

Code https://github.com/infrascloudy/AnsiBot

[gundalow]

Will need renaming (bot and Git Repo) to avoid confusion with github.com/ansible/ansibullbot/

[allanice001]

@gundalow I agree
suggestions?

• DocBot ?
• Searchy ?
• lmatfy ? (Let Me Ansible That For You)

[gundalow]

I picked answerbot (and answerbot_) both are now registered with NickServer on Freenode and the bot is live on #ansible

[abadger]

Cool. anything left to be done on this or can it now be closed?

[allanice001]

I would suggest this be left open, to facilitate commity feedback. !about points here

…

On Thu, Jan 12, 2017, 20:08 Toshio Kuratomi ***@***.***> wrote: Cool. anything left to be done on this or can it now be closed? — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#48 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAqxtZdsNgytPGjWcc6qtPMUoc6Jx_J2ks5rRmwdgaJpZM4LTWRM> .

[DanyC97]

when are you guys planning to enable (even as a preview/ alpha etc) in #ansible channel so we can play and see how it works?

[allanice001]

It is running there @DanyC97
(Commands are in the topic)

Whats you're IRC nick, then i can catch up with you there ?

[DanyC97]

@allanice001 following the DM chat we had should you find anything and need someone to give it a go please do reach out to me here or irc ( DanyC is my nick)

for everyone benefit the behavior is like this:

• running !about from #ansible channel returns the expected result from the answerbot
• running !search ansible install from #ansible channel does not return any answer nor any PM
• running !search ansible install from a DM to answerbot returns the expected result

[allanice001]

Bug fixed, and committed to upstream repo.

Thanks @DanyC97 for the report