Announce handling bot

Stream: Zulip meta

[Joachim Breitner]

Would it be a good idea to, and would anyone feel inspired to, write a Zulip bot that for every message on #announce creates a corresponding topic on #general and posts to the announcement topic that discussion should happen in the other one? Or are people ok with manually moving the inevitable discussion over and over again, given that it's just a few clicks?

[Kevin Buzzard]

It would be good if someone clarified why we don't discuss announcements in #announce . Assuming that there's a good reason for this, then a bot doing this would be a great idea! I think that it's something to do with "everyone is subscribed to #announce " but I've never really known what that means in practice

[Shreyas Srinivas]

Kevin Buzzard said:

It would be good if someone clarified why we don't discuss announcements in #announce . Assuming that there's a good reason for this, then a bot doing this would be a great idea! I think that it's something to do with "everyone is subscribed to #announce " but I've never really known what that means in practice

I am not sure that's the (only?) reason. You have to actively choose to be notified about a particular thread.

I can make a guess: Having a conversation on the announcement channel can drown out the original announcement. If I want to recall a specific announcement from sometime ago, and there are a few hundred messages under it, then I have to scroll through all that.

[Kim Morrison]

Regarding a bot, I think there is some difficulty with deciding what stream the discussion should go in. We've certainly had followup discussions in #general, #job postings, and #Machine Learning for Theorem Proving. I think it's not a problem to do manually for now.

[Eric Wieser]

I think the bot could just create a message to start a discussion thread in #general, and then we can move it somewhere better by hand?

[Eric Wieser]

Compared to the current version where we split the thread in #announce by hand, and end up with a discussion thread where the first message has no context

[Kevin Buzzard]

The first post by the bot in #general could be a link to the announcement

[Kyle Miller]

where the first message has no context

When you move messages, you can send an automated notice to the new topic that has a link to the original topic. Is that not enough context?

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[Kevin Buzzard]

Yeah maybe this will work: let's see what happens!

[Eric Rodriguez]

This obscures the context when reading from the top

Kyle Miller said:

where the first message has no context

When you move messages, you can send an automated notice to the new topic that has a link to the original topic. Is that not enough context?

image.png

[Eric Wieser]

Yes, the move message appears only after everything that was already posted in the wrong place: the context is only available after the nth message