Fido: a friendly Slackbot for teaching staff support

Fido is a Slackbot that has a variety of features to assist teaching staff members. Some main features include:

• Student/Staff roster lookup
• Information recall
• Group tagging
• Piazza paging
• Timed action item reminder

How can I use Fido for my course?

Check out setup instructions. Once that's done, simply add Fido to your desired Slack channel by clicking on the channel name, then "Add an app" where you will be able to find the Fido Bot app. You can also DM Fido under the Apps section of the sidebar.

Quick Cheatsheet

• Look up a student on the roster: @fido whois [student name|email|SID]
• Look up a staff member on the roster: @fido whois [staff name|email|SID]
• Look up all staff members for a lab number/time/room: @fido whois teaching [Lab number|Lab location|Lab time]
• Get information (e.g. links) by key word: @fido fetch [keyword]
• Tag a group by group name: @fido groupshout [group name]
• Set up a timed action item reminder: @fido [pretext...] reactcheck [time] [date] [posttext...]

Features Overview

whois: student/staff roster lookup

• Look up a student on the roster: @fido whois <student_key>
  • student_key: one of student name, email, SID

• Look up a staff member on the roster: @fido whois <staff_key>
  • staff_key: one of staff name, email, Lab number, Lab location, Lab time

• Note that you can get all the staff members teaching in a certain room:

• The same with the lab time:

fetch: get commonly used information

• Get information (e.g. links) by key word: @fido fetch <keyword>
  • You can view all of the currently available keywords and their corresponding information in config/fetch_map.json. Please make a pull request to add more items to this mapping.

groupshout: tag entire groups of staff members

• Tag a group by group name: @fido groupshout <group_name>
  • The currently supported list of group names is: gsi, gsi-returning, gsi-new, tutor, tutor-returning, tutor-new, lead, professor.

• You can also groupshout by lab time or location:

piazza-pager: channel-specific digest of unanswered Piazza posts

• This feature automatically alerts channels with the set of unanswered Piazza posts on a channel-by-channel basis. For example, questions with the logistics tag would be sent to the logistics channel.
• Currently, this is done two times a day: 2 PM and 10 PM.
• Once you resolve a Piazza question, you can delete it from Fido's feed by pressing the "x" (this will update Fido's feed for all users globally).
• The current mapping of Piazza tags to Slack channels is here.

reactcheck: timed action item reminders

• Set up a reactcheck: @fido reactcheck [time] [date]
  • time: follows one of the following formats: noon OR midnight OR [H]H:MM[am|pm]
  • date: follows one of the following formats: today OR tonight OR tomorrow OR [M]M/[D]D
• This feature allows you to send out important announcements that need to be read or have action items due at some future time. For example, filling out a Google form by tonight.
• Note that you can have text (e.g. the actual "announcement" you want people to read) before and after the reactcheck call. However, the message MUST start with a tag to @fido.
• If all users react to a post before the designated deadline, then Fido will tag the original user who created the post once time is up to let them know that everyone completed the action items.

Examples

All of these examples were run in a channel with two users, @scott and @annie.

• reactchecks both users because they did not react:

• reactchecks only the users who have not reacted: