Feature Proposal: Scheduling / Set Reminder

[misslivirose]

Discord users may want to set reminders or schedule a future meetup for their communities. The bot could surface this as a feature to allow members to set a future time to be reminded of an event and drive recurring meetups.

The design could be either reminder-driven or event-driven. I feel like in either case, you want the ability to have a reminder set before the event, but it feels more intuitive to create events with reminders as opposed to simply creating the reminder itself.

I'm envisioning this as something like:

!hubs schedule [date] [time] [meeting description] - add a new upcoming event to the channel schedule, then prompt the user to choose the time for their reminder message for the event from [0 minutes | 30 minutes | 1 hour | 12 hours | 1 day].
!hubs schedule - shows all of the scheduled reminders

When the reminder time hits, the bot posts a message with the room link.

Down the road, we could make reminders more configurable if the feature is requested / used heavily.

Open questions:

• Should the schedule flow be consolidated into a single action?
• Do we want to limit the number of reminders that can be set to avoid having someone use them to spam the channel? Perhaps reminders are locked to users with the 'Manage Channel' permission.

[mqp]

I'm sure there are many Discord bots that can do something like, let you set a reminder for later, and then print out a message later reminding you of the thing. What is a benefit we would get from building this into the Hubs bot versus using a separate reminder tool?

The only obvious thing I can think of is "the bot could do something like create and bridge a new hub, instead of just printing a reminder", but that doesn't really sound easier than having a human do it. After all, some human has to do stuff like say which scene it should be.

[misslivirose]

One benefit is having it automatically surface the Hubs link in the room as part of the reminder that I set, which wouldn't happen through another tool. Using an external scheduling bot (assuming I've already gone through the process of thinking that scheduling is a feature I need, which I may not jump to automatically, but would discover if it was surfaced to me through a bot I already have in my server) would rely on finding, using, and configuring a second bot, then manually setting the reminder to link to the room.

I would hypothesize that there are servers out there that would benefit from this because they're owned by folks new to Discord, or who are very particular about inviting in bots, or who would be more likely to have repeat rooms if the functionality was presented for them. I see value in having more flexible tools available, and don't consider this an urgent feature request, but in observing how people are currently scheduling, it feels like there could be something here.

[brianpeiris]

Seems like a feature worth running an experiment on.

I would expect to be able to schedule the event and have it repeat automatically.

!hubs schedule [date] [time] [repeat] [description] where [repeat] can be [none|daily|weekly|monthly|<list of days>]

And then !hubs schedule prints

[1]: "Meetup" - May 3 - Weekly
[2]: "Standup" - May 3 - Monday, Wednesday, Friday

so that I can !hubs schedule remove 1

[blairmacintyre]

So, looking at the data we got from the CHI conference, here are some numbers that would go beyond what could be manually entered:

• 17 rooms
• 50 time slots over the week
• 422 sessions spread over those rooms and slots
• 2297 individual "paperIDs" ... !!

Of course, this makes me really want much more optimization here, beyond the discord bot.

However, it would be great to feed this in and be able to go to a channel/room and see @brianpeiris's !hubs schedule and have it list the next part of the schedule, and provide ways to have people let others know when they plan on being there. This seems like a big need when there are a lot of things going on with an org, and could also be used to signal a need to generate mutliple rooms, etc.

I see a big need, then, is to have people be able to express interest in part of the schedule, so that if I looked I could find sessions that others were planning on attending, and add themselves to the schedule.

I could see this same thing being useful for the education situation: I could set up a repeating schedule for a room (watching videos, office hours, chatting about homeworks, whatever) and have people say when they'd be available, so you could see at a glance what's

[blairmacintyre]

Just found this: https://www.discalbot.com

Seems like it might meet some of these needs, if it does, perhaps we should support them (via mozilla's funding of OSS projects) or contribute?

[mqp]

I made an extremely barebones version of this in #69 but I will leave this issue hanging around.