kaoushikmurugan / yet-another-better-office-hour-bot

Yet Another Better Office-Hours Bot

Hello there

I'm a fourth year Computer Sciene and Engineering major at UC Davis, with an interest in Software Engineering and Game Development!

• 🚀 I’m currently working on Yet Another Office-hours Bot (and some games 🤫)
• 🔭 Researching on using Deep Reinforcement Learning techniques to solve Rubik's Cubes in a human like manner
• 🌱 I’m learning PyTorch and Unity
• 👯 I’m happy to collaborate on pretty much anything
• 💬 Ask me about Computer Sciene, Physics, Games, Animation, and Puzzles!
• 📫 How to reach me: (username)@(mail service from alphabet).com
• ⚡ WCA_id="2013MURU01"

yet-another-better-office-hour-bot's Issues

Environment: Separate development and production

https://dev.to/kristianroopnarine/how-to-separate-your-test-development-and-production-databases-using-nodeenv-anl

Separate file that stores bot messages

A file that allows you to easily edit most, if not all messages that the bot can send on the server

feature: `/serious_mode`

turns off all the emoticons in servers

Performace: `/start` and `/stop` is bottlenecked by discord api, google sheets api, and discord api rate limit

Feature: `/easy_vc_setup`

Inspired by the vc problem that prof. Butner had recently.

Instead of letting the server admin manually create voice channels and manage permissions, we can let bob do that for them.
/easy_vc_setup will show a modal, ask for the vc category name and the number of voice channels they want. The names will default to Office 1 Office 2 and admins can change them later since bob doesn't check the vc names.

• BOB will NOT keep track of these offices because all BOB does is makes an invite to whatever vc the helper is in, does a permission overwrite, and sends the invite to the student.

Update to Discord.js V14

Migration guide: https://discordjs.guide/additional-info/changes-in-v14.html#enum-values

VC channel permission overwrite is not automatically revoked

https://discord.com/channels/1020848082172248086/1020864200194674719/1029121567545888831

Performance: Use priority queue and dequeue

This is totally unnecessary but if we ever find YABOB to be slow there are potential time complexity improvements we can make:

1. Maintain a hashmap of helper ids to priority queues. Map<string, PrioQueue<HelpQueueID>>. Each priority queue will have all the queue id' that the helper is approved for. Then we get $O(\log n)$ when using /next instead of $O(n)$ from going over all the queues.
2. Use double ended queue for internal HelpQueueV2 implementation. Maintain a head and tail pointer/index and preallocate an array with the size of total number of people in the server. Head will point to the 1st student to dequeue and tail points to the last student. Every time dequeue() is called, return students[head] then head = (head + 1) % queue.length. Same thing for tail when some one joins. But this could be dangerous because indices bad lol

Command(s) to print useful data from the attendance sheet (helper only)

Useful data such as:

• hours helped in current week
• recently helped students

Discord API Issue: Role creation call might never resolve/reject

discordjs/discord.js#7695
This bug will cause the Promise to never return and blocking everything else.
I have a temporary solution that uses Promise.race() for force a timeout, but there could be unknown side effects because the promise is still in the JS event queue.

But right now the deployed bob works fine so idk

Linting: Enable strict type checking and semicolons

Inconsistency when referring to "Staff" and "Helper" in code and in docs.

Docs refers to the host of the office hours (i.e. tutor, TA or Prof) as Helper
However in the current code, both helper and staff is used (The name of the role is named Staff)

Related to issue #10 and #12

Bump compile target to ES6

Make the Attendance tracking spreadsheet *per-server*

Currently, the attendance tracking google sheets is per-bot, not per-server. This means that if a same bot (or instance) of YABOB is in multiple servers, they all share the same google sheets, which may not be ideal.

Schedule(s) should update when an event is added/deleted/modified on the google calendar

Feature: Nicer Google Calendar Embed UI

Objective

The public embed UI provided by google calendar is really ugly and difficult to read, so we should built our own solution to make it look modern.

Make the bot depend on role-id's instead of role names for Admin, Staff and Student

More flexibility for server admins

Docs: use automatic doc generation and migrate to github pages

Let's use this tool https://typedoc.org/
Looks really pretty

Code Improvement: Better error handling

Let's use this rust/go like pattern and the library mentioned in this article:

https://journal.plain.com/posts/2022-10-04-error-handling-in-typescript-like-a-pro/

Store back-ups for queues in firebase in case the bot crashes

Change backup logic to be event based, not timer based

Feature: CLI setup wizard

Potential Features

• bob create Initiate wizard
• Ask if the user wants to generate default server templates (ask user for the number of classes, generate, then tell the user to change the names later)
• Interactively ask the user to enable tutor attendance tracking. Require Google sheets id, enable api, calendar api
• bob doctor check if credentials are set up correctly. Users can run this if BOB is down for whatever reason.
  • Check if the .env file exists and has all the credentials
  • Send a simple request to see if the documents are actually accessible, abort if any requests fail
• Dedicated bob-config.json to store settings of every bob instance

Feature: `/start_exam_review`, `/stop_exam_review`, and google sheet integration

Initial Idea

Exam review session mode for /start. We can keep track of exam review sessions this way:

1. Helper uses /start examReview=True
2. Show a modal asking for a zoom link. Use try catch with the URL() constructor to test if it's a valid url
3. This link will override the normal queue content in QueueDisplay
4. When students use /enqueue or [JOIN], YABOB will say that there's a review session in progress and show them the zoom link.
5. (Optional) When they use /stop, YABOB will show another modal asking for a recording link.
6. Send all of these data to google sheets through new events onExamReviewStart and onExamReviewStop

Attendance Sheet should show tutee's discord id in addition to display name and username

Just for easier identification of the tutee on discord and/or if they change usernames/nicknames

Add functionality to `/when_next` to show upcoming tutoring hours for all queues

Consistency: Missing commands that correspond to Notification buttons

Just for consistency :)

Deploy on AWS with at least 2 stages

• Run in docker container
• Set up Github actions to automatically deploy a stable branch
• Use .env files instead of .json and provide an example .env.example file

Use Description instead of Summary (aka Title) for calendar parsing

Gives more freedom to making titles to the events.

Suggested form:

<Random stuff>

YABOB_START
Calendar-name - queue_name_1, queue_name_2, queue_name_3 ...
YABOB_END

<Random stuff>

Make new commands to let Bot Admins do certain commands "on-behalf" of other users

e.g. letting Bot-Admins do /make_calendar_string for a staff member

Improve the way the bot figures out who is the helper for an event

Currently, the mapping of "Calendar name to discord id" works and helps prevent linking of discord info and personal names directly on the calendar

However it isn't necessarily an easy setup, and admins might find it annoying.

• Requiring a resource (the google sheets) other than the calendar to work
• A strict format that the google sheets needs to follow
• Additional work for helpers to figure out a calendar name, and having to follow a particular format when adding events to the calendar

/start and /stop conflicts with each other

Steps to reproduce:

1. Student close dm's
2. Student use [Join Notif]
3. Tutor use /start will lead to "you are already hosting"
4. Tutor use /stop will lead to "you are not currently hosting"

Multiple helpers on one queue

Currently, the bot assumes that if your calendar name is in the name of an event, then you are doing to tutor/help for all the queues that you can help for.

Since there are some instances where helpers might want to help for only one certain queue, e.g. for midterm or final review sessions, we would want to for the bot to identify which queues an event is for.

Suggested idea: Have the list of queues for which the event is for in the description of the calendar event. If empty (or no queues listed), default to all queues.

Helper notification settings for when a person joins a queue

a) get notified when a queue goes from being empty to having someone it in (current method)
b) get notified for each person that joins a queue that you help for

Avatars in Embed should use the url to the bot's avatar (via Discord API)

Feature: Helper Control Panel

Dependency: use a new ascii table package

The current ascii-table package is no longer actively maintained
We could use this one: https://github.com/AllMightySauron/ascii-table3

Improve bot embeds

• SimpleEmbed() can work with both interaction.reply() and interaction.editReply()
• Change help-command-messages text files to embed jsons
• If string being passed through an embed description is longer than 4096 characters, then split it into multiple embeds

Feature: Command /insights to read the google sheet and compute server stats

Here's the main idea but I don't know how this is going to work yet lol:

1. Write a python script that takes in a CSV and generates some sort of output file like JSON that shows server stats like the number of tutoring hours etc.
2. Make an extension that injects another command called /insights that downloads the most recent CSV from google sheets and run the script from part 1. This may or may not block the main thread
3. Running the script can be done with node's child_process library

Re-make /msg_after_vc_leave (and related commands)

Command missing from rewrite

Optional logging on server

YABOB can log user interactions and other things it logs on to the console to a channel on each server. By default it won't log anything, you need to use a /set_log_channel [Channel] command.

Auto-leave from notification queue

Students can set a time limit for how long they want to be in the notification queue before they want to leave it.

Useful if a student joins a notification queue, but no-one opens the queue within the time they need help. e.g. they could get pinged that the queue is opened the next day

Feature: Calendar title validation

Currently the schedule message updater parses the string expecting it will be valid.
We can separate this logic into a command that tutors can use before putting their hours in the calendar.
Maybe something like this

function validateCalendarTitle(str: string): boolean {
// use regex here
}

Once the tutors validate their string prompt them to put it on the calendar.
We can just ignore the invalid ones in the actual updater.

Feature: use modals for `/set...` commands

Opened to reference in other issues.

Feature: Queue auto clear

From Prof. Butner:

Another thing that I would like to see is the ability to set a time limit for how long a person remains enqueued after the last helper for a queue leaves because quite often I or my TAs will forget to clear the queue when we have to leave.
Something like /set_queue_auto_clear 4. Which would mean that if the queue is not reopened within 4 hours after the last helper closes the queue the queue would be cleared

Update command, function and variable names

Most of them are confusing 🫠
Suggested ones to change:

• /when_next
• /notify_me
• /remove_notif
• /post_session_msg
• MsgAfterLeaveVCHandler()
• ListNextHoursCommandHandler()
• getQueueHelpersFirstName()
• getUpcomingHoursTable()
• UpdateMemberJoinedVC()
• UpdateMemberLeftVC()
• getMsgAfterLeaveVC()
• RefreshCommandHelpChannels()

Make /help command

Memory: Switch to LRU cache for calendar id map

Just in case if we get a lot of unique names. We don't want the calendar id map to become infinitely big.

Complete Redesign of YABOB's Architecture

Objective

Avoid bad JS practices and make YABOB more modular.
Allow developers to easily extend YABOB's functionality by providing them with proper interface.

Most up to date diagram
Current Features

Ongoing Design

• Better start up error messages

Command Performance Issues

1. /stop is really slow when using google sheets. This is likely a network issue.
   • Potential fix: Give user feedback when their time is recorded and just let google sheets update finish in the background.

Give ability to clear all queues only to admins.

Clearing a specific queue should only be done if you are a helper for that queue.

Linting: Avoid unnecessary null values

1. Avoid unnecessary null class members
2. Use nullish coalescing
3. Prefer const and remove null initializations