Re: [Tails-dev] Help robot for #Tails

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Author: sajolida
Date:  
To: The Tails public development discussion list, xray
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Help robot for #Tails
IronSoldier:
> I have developed a help robot for #Whonix to help people when no ones
> arround or for FAQ that you are tired to find the URLs to the doc.
>
> After making a little demo and getting good comments about it from
> intrigeri, I made a sample with Tails data. With a bit of work it can
> be ready in a day or two of work.


Nice, I just tried it out and it can surely be helpful. Nonetheless, I'm
not the one doing support on IRC so I won't follow-up on testing and
reporting on that tool once it will be in ready for prime time. Don't
hesitate to ping more directly the people who are active there for
feedback. I can give out names if needed :)

> I am wondering if you are interested to have a fully working bot to
> help in the channel. If so, I will run and maintain the bot. If you
> guys are interested, the bot will be "self-maintained", it will parse
> the documentation TOC and other pages if specified to add new links to
> the list, so almost no human intervention will be required.


But I know the documentation and web-based resources quite well, so I
can definitely help you knowing which information to index:

- In the documentation (https://tails.boum.org/doc/):
  - The section indexes. You can find them by doing:
    find -iname "*.index.mdwn"
  - The pages URLs. We try to have short but meaningful URLs and people
doing support by email often type some of them by heart already.
  - The anchors in the pages. Some key parts of the documentation have
anchors that speeds up user support. You can find them by doing:
    git grep "a id=" -- "wiki/src/doc/*.mdwn"


- In the FAQ (https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/faq/) which we will
published officially very soon:
  - The TOC of the page
  - The anchors for each question:
    git grep "a id=" -- "wiki/src/blueprint/faq.mdwn"


I think that if you start by indexing all that you will have a whole
bunch of interesting keywords for your bot.

Then people using this bot on IRC could also express their needs in
terms of indexing, anchors, and possible FAQ entries, but that's another
topic.

> Currently on #Tails, SIN (The bot), will answer to !help command.
> Issuing !help <keyword(s)> will look inside the database for links and
> return the results. Issuing !help <nickname> <keyword(s)> will return
> the result to the specified nickname.


About the "!help <nickname> <keyword(s)>" command, I find it weird that
the person issuing this command won't even see the result of her own
search. What about sending a copy of the result to both the destination
nickname and the sender?

> Based on your requests/comments, I can modify the bot to add
> functions like !rules or almost anything else...


Something else we spotted out, is that for the moment it returns URLs to
"index.en.html" pages, so it skips the auto-negotiation of language. For
example, instead of:

    https://tails.boum.org/doc/about/warning/index.en.html


It should point to:

    https://tails.boum.org/doc/about/warning/