mwillsey / crossbot

A slackbot to compete on mini crosswords (or any other daily challenge).

Hi there 👋

I'm a professor at UC Berkeley in the EECS department.

Check out more at my website.

My current research focuses are program optimization and analysis, powered by techniques such as e-graphs, equality saturation, and datalog.

crossbot's Issues

Morning reminders

Crossbot no longer gives daily reminders with a link to the crossword and sudoku

Plots are covered by legend and are hard to read

The plot is hard to read, and the legend covers half the plot.

• Switch from line to dot plot. The lines are meaningless and confusing
• Move legend away from plot area
• Widen plot to fit more days

Crossbot should only send messages to a channel when it makes sense

Related to #35.

When people use do "/crossbot add ..." outside of the main channel, they get 500 service error. I think this is linked to a lack of permissions. When the app echoes the message back as the user, it will fail if the bot (app?) isn't in that channel. Additionally, the reaction will fail in channels that i am not a part of, since it's using my API key.

I think we should just have crossbot respond to everything in the slash command (almost always ephemerally), and check before echoing back if it has permissions.

Plot.js normalization and/or smoothing is incorrect

Something weird happened in translation. The normalization differs from the python impl.

Saved SQL queries

Now that there is this SQL query interface, it would be great if some of our better queries could be easily saved and reused. I could imagine an interface like this:

• cb sql --save <name> <query ....> saves the query under a fixed name. If a binding for that name already exists probably best to override.
• cb saved <name> runs a saved query, or prints an error message if none exists.

Add confirmation should show weekday

That will make it easier to ensure you submitted it on the right day.

Cron jobs should return something so they get logged

They should also log they time they are run

The return value of the do method gets logged in the db. We should use that.

https://github.com/Tivix/django-cron/blob/7fa5c2d2835520d8c920f3c103937ab292d9e545/django_cron/__init__.py#L215

Sidebar doesn't appear on mobile.

The website sidebar just doesn't appear on mobile. There doesn't seem to be a way to see the things that were supposed to be there.

cc @emichael

Mute logging during testing

Informational logging output during successful tests is annoying. We can use one of the strategies here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5255657/how-can-i-disable-logging-while-running-unit-tests-in-python-django

Reactions come from me, not crossbot

Steak reporting is broken.

When reporting who won the day before last, it actually reports the person with the worst time (I think). I think it's broken in other ways too :(

Use argparse to parse command arguments

This would work better than regexes. It would also provide better help.

Plotting a specific date range does not work.

plot 2017-05-19 and plot 2017-05-19 2017-05-26 should plot the given date range (or from the given date to today). Instead it just plots everything.

Add more ranking functionality.

announce could include some information about the best performance of the week (or other time period). This could be a simple min time or something more complicated like variance from the mean of that day.

Make some titles

These should be displayed next to the user.

log scale enhancements

Log scale should be "symlog" to support the negative numbers in the normalized plots. Also, log scale should disable clipping but preserve reasonable y-axis ticks.

Names should refresh on demand

If we get an entry from a name we haven't seen, we should ask Slack who they are

Announcements should reflect previous day's scores

Announcements from crossbot currently seem to reflect the current day's scores,
but most people probably will not have submitted by 8:30am. They should instead
reflect the previous day's scores.

Add notification for entry milestones

10,000th entry, etc.

Remove Slack team setting, keep pipeline stage checking team id

It seems that Slack doesn't like it when we pass it the team parameter during OAuth since crossbot isn't distributed. We should still check that the user is signed into the right team after the oauth flow, but avoid passing team to Slack.

Home page should show the announcement and current times.

The index.html is pretty bare right now. It would be nice if it showed the current times and perhaps the stuff from the announcement logic.

With this, I feel that we could deprecate the announce commands.
cc @dwoos

Reactions are too harsh on Saturday

The puzzles are 7x7 instead of 5x5, so the bot's standards should be adjusted.

Crossbot advances to next day too soon.

Somehow it seems to coincide with when tomorrow's crossword gets posted (in the evening). It's probably a time zone issue.

Deployment doesn't run collect static

rank command

The plotting functions (times, normalized, elo/glicko in the future) could also be used to just output a ranking of the current day. So rank and plot would just be two ways to visualize the same input data.

Also, the ranking function should show the delta of individuals from the previous day (in ranking).

Get bookmarklet working again

Requires a "times" page where users can view a particular time. Maybe include links to previous and next.

Clarification?

Wait...is this a bot that will automatically scrape the crossword times people post in a slack channel and save them to a leaderboard of some kind?

Help on Setup?

@mwillsey this crossbot sounds awesome but I'm quite unfamiliar with python slackbots. Would you possibly be able to guide me on how to set this up?

Refine add output

• Don’t show date if it’s today
• show date after time, like the add command

Allow database dumps over slack

You should be able to @crossbot dump-db and have crossbot upload the database to slack. This would make it really easy to develop crossbot.

Get the predictor working again

Persist deletions and edits of times.

The times tables should be pseudo write-only. One easy way to get this is to add a new column invalidated which holds a timestamp (or not). Deletion or editing of a time will just add a timestamp to that column, marking it as invalid. Uniqueness would now be over (user, date, invalid), allowing many invalid entries for a date, by only one valid one.

Plot returns three times

Running @crossbot plot returns three plots. The first one comes back quickly, then the second takes a little longer, and the third takes about a minute. This smells like retries to me, especially since crossbot itself is reporting that it received three requests for plots.

Admin sign-in page should redirect to Slack

Create inventory system

Achievements should be public

Right now, if a person gets a streak achievement in a private channel, the achievement goes there instead of public.

Smoothing should go past the beginning of the plot

Because smoothing is an average, it should reach back into the past to calculate the first point of the plot. It doesn't do that right now, and that causes the first point to be "overweighted",

Streak code seems to be broken

This announcement should display a streak:

Post times back as the user

Use the chat.post to send the message with the user's name and photo

JS visualization

Now that it's a web app, it should have some kind of interactive visualization. Maybe something like http://mpld3.github.io

Achievements may get triggered multiple times

Zach found a bug where if he backdates a date and gets a streak, he gets way too many achievements.

announce automatically

crossbot should announce every day in the morning and/or when the crossword comes out.

README refers to non-existant requirements.txt

In the README installation instructions, one step refers to requirements.txt:

# install and setup the package
pip install -r requirements.txt

But it seems this file got lost at some point? I think it should include the Python statistics package or maybe just mention that needs to be installed now to test crossbot.

Handle ties in announce.

Announce doesn't handle ties. It will only report one winner.