This is a simple Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange chat bot which keeps an eye on a selected list of rooms, and makes sure they are not frozen.
The threshold is currently set to 12 days since the previous message, to leave some leeway for possible accidents (the freeze happens after 14 days of inactivity).
There is no interactive interface to the bot; create a pull request if you would like to add a room to Sloshy's watch list.
In the YAML configuration file, add the server's name
to the rooms key if it is missing (though that's unlikely)
and create a new entry with information about the room you want to add;
- The
idis the room's numeric identifier. This (together with the server's name) is the way Sloshy finds the room. - The
namefield is just a display string for Sloshy's status messages. It can be anything, but should describe the room reasonably unambiguously to humans. - The
contactfield indicates who requested the room to be added, in case we would need to touch base with you later on to assess whether the room still needs to be on the list, etc. The format should be your user name, followed by the network account id in round parentheses. The network id number can be found by clicking "Network profile" on any profile page for your account. (For example, Sloshy is user 16115299 on Stack Overflow, but network user 21818820.)
In brief, if your chatroom's URL is https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/12345/my-room, and your network account ID is 123456789, you would add
rooms:
- chat.stackexchange.com:
- name: "my room's name"
id: 12345
contact: your name (123456789)
in the configuration file.
(This is showing the complete YAML structure;
the rooms top-level key
and the server chat.stackexchange.com obviously already exist
in the file.)
Please separately make sure that Sloshy has write access to any privileged room you want to add to the list.
Perhaps notice also that there are two main chat servers with very similar names, where one contains "overflow" and the other contains "exchange".
Besides rooms, there are some other configuration options
which can be specified in the YAML file.
For the most part, these are undocumented options
for use in internal testing,
but the following are expected to remain stable and supported:
local: boolean; set totrueto disable connecting to chat. Sloshy will still need to open network connections to fetch chat transcripts, but will not emit any chat messages.nodename: string; set to the name you would like to display as Sloshy's location in the startup message.threshold: expression indicating after how much inactivity to emit an anti-freeze message to a room. The default is 12 days; set to a different number to override. (See the source for advanced and possibly unstable options.)
There is a simple Github Action which runs nightly.