Slack Autoresponder

The Slack autoresponder is a friendly Slack bot, written in python, that reminds you that some folks feel excluded when you refer to a group as "guys".

This bot was the result of the evolution of zatech's original bot, which was inspired by 18F's. Some users had the hypothesis that using the built-in Slack auto responses had the opposite effect from the intention.

Quickstart

First some configuration:

name	description	optional/required
SLACKBOT_TOKEN	Slack bot token, I think the simplest way is using a legacy token. Used for the bot to authenticate with your Slack workspace.	Required
SLACKBOT_REPORT_URL	If you generate a Slack webhook URL and configure it here, then you'll get reports of the form "{'{channel_name}-{user}: count}" to that channel. We use a private channel called bot-reports for this to see if the bot is running.	Optional

It's recommended to install the dependencies in a Python virtual environment:

python3 -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -U slackclient

Then we can go ahead and run the bot with a script like the following:

export SLACKBOT_TOKEN="<YOUR_TOKEN_HERE>"
export SLACKBOT_REPORT_URL="<YOUR_OPTIONAL_REPORTS_WEBHOOK_URL_HERE>"
python main.py