Alerter Reserver

High level overview:

When the Help Desk online gets very busy, we'd like to call in people who are in reserve (those who are on red/yellow on the roster, or other teachers who are available). With this, reserves can completely ignore the #help-desk and listen only for the #reserves channel so that they can focus on non-floor-related work.

Based on Teaching Task Issue #82 we'd like to call in reserves when a message meets this criteria:

• There has been an un-answered call for help in #help-desk for some amount of time
• There are x or more unanswered #help-desk requests

Current setup

This repo describes a Discord bot to achieve this by:

• Storing an list of unresolved messages in memory (for each cohort's help desk), where each message has three states: unresolved, sentToLocal, and resolved
• Listening for new messages in #help-desk and adds it to the unresolved messages
• Listening for reactions in #help-desk and #reserve-alerts, if an unresolved message receives a reaction, it's considered resolved

The unresolved messages are checked every 30 seconds and unresolved messages are sent to the #reserve-alerts channel if:

• It has been unresolved for 7 or more minutes
• There are 3 or more unresolved messages being stored

When sent, people with the @reserves role are tagged with some information about the help request, the message's status is changed to sentToLocal.

Teachers typically use emojis to communicate whether or not they have opted to help a student, and so any emojis added or removed to #help-desk messages that have already been sent to the #reserve-alerts channel are reflected there, and vice versa.

NOTE: Issue #2 describes a feature request to send help requests that have sat unresolved in the #reserve-alerts channel (when things are really busy), which will introduce a forth state to messages: sentToGlobal

Commands

• /reserves list: lists all people with the @reserves role
• /reserves toggle: toggles the @reserves role for yourself
• /reserves join: adds the @reserves role for yourself
• /reserves leave: removes the @reserves role for yourself

Where the bot runs

Currently the bot runs on a Heroku worker dyno on Rohan's account. It's not terribly difficult to transfer to anyone else who would like to deploy the bot. However, it should be noted that it only needs to run in one place at a time.

Roadmap

The Roadmap for this project can be briefly summarised by the small number of issues for the project.

However, there are indeed some important decisions that need to be made for the bot regarding an official name!