RSVPBot should only reply to actual commands, and not any message that begins with rsvp.

[wtfcarlos]

Basically, we need to fix this:

[jamak]

Quick question here: is there a good reason that RSVPBot respond with a stream message rather than private messages? I can think of a good reason for rsvp summary, but it seems like everything else should probably be private. Is it to simplify the un-rsvp case?

[wtfcarlos]

@jamak The thing from the beginning is that I believe that people learn how to use a bot by watching other people use it.

I do agree that the constant back and forth with RSVPBot can be too spammy now that it's so popular, but then again the reason it's so popular is that everyone watches everyone else using it.

People need some kind of feedback that the bot is working and that it's not down (e.g if someone types rsvp yes and the bot doesn't respond that's a huge red flag.

OTOH, a XXX is attending! private response would be redundant since you already know that you rsvp yesd to an event.

It's kind of a tricky subject, as I want to both heavily reduce the spam / boilerplate generated by RSVPBot / users of RSVPBot and at the same time I want to keep it easy to learn.

[Yuffster]

Personally, I'm a huge fan of RSVPBot's banter. It really adds to an event thread.

[wtfcarlos]

As a first step, we could test private responses for every rsvp set <PARAMETER> to be private, since typically only one person sets those parameters.

[wtfcarlos]

rsvp help is already private.
rsvp summary should be, by definition, public
And I really don't want the response to rsvp <yes|no|maybe> to be private

[jamak]

I was imagining a case where rsvpbot responds to all commands in private, and maybe adding some boilerplate like "respond with rsvp yes | no | maybe " to the output of rsvp init . That way people could immediately get feedback from the bot but it would be at least half as spammy. I personally think its popular because its useful, not because it's easy to watch others interact with it; of course this being your project and all, I defer to your wisdom 😄 .

Another follow-up question: If Zulip were to implement reaction emoji like slack (something I think @jdherg is working on), would you be averse to using reactions to rsvp for the same reasons (e.g. you react with a specific emoji to rsvp yes|no|maybe )?