QuoteBot

-Slack Quotebot-

The gaming group I am part of goes back nearly two decades. Back in the early days we used IRC to communicate while outside of games. About a year ago we decided to modernize and start using Slack. One of the features that we really enjoyed while using IRC was the ability to save a quote from a group member (user). We wanted this functionality in Slack as well. After scouting around the internet we couldn’t find anything that met our needs so a fellow member and I decided to make our own!

We decided to use the Go language since it is something we were not particularly familiar with and this seemed like a good opportunity to learn something new. I plan to contribute to the QuoteBot to increase its functionality and will make a future post about it.

The quotes are stored in a MongoDB. After getting the basic QuoteBot setup we wanted to import all of the old quotes from IRC so that they would not be lost. The quotes were stored in a messy plaintext file. I worked some regex magic and then wrote some Node.js powered JavaScript in order to parse, create, and then insert all of the old quotes into mongo. I primarily use Java at work so this was a good refresher of the JavaScript. I learned last summer during my internship at AMEX.

The code for the import script can be found here.
The master repo for the QuoteBot can be found here.