The Slack Standup Snitch is a Slack bot that counts the unique days that each user was active on a specified channel and calls out the inactive users. It runs on Python 3 without any further dependencies. It does the timestamp math to grab the posts from Slack between midnight the previous night and n days before that. It aggregates the unique days - if you posted five times on Monday and once on Wednesday, that counts for two days. It returns a text histogram of the activity and "ats" the users who checked in zero times.
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Clone this repo.
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Get a Slack API token. Save it to the repo's directory under
api_token.txt
. (You can save it wherever you want, but the.gitignore
is put together to make this a convenient choice. The same is true for the other filenames below.) -
Get a list of your users along with their internal Slack IDs:
python3 list_users.py < api_token.txt > users.csv
Typically you'll manually edit
users.csv
to pare the list down to the active people you want to monitor. -
Get a list of your channels along with their internal Slack IDs:
python3 list_channels.py < api_token.txt > input_channel.csv cp input_channel.csv output_channel.csv
Manually remove all but two lines from each file:
input_channel.csv
should have a header and the line for the channel you want to monitor. Similarly,output_channel.csv
should have a header and the line for the channel you want to send the report to.
I run the bot from my work computer each Monday morning:
python3 standup_snitch.py -t api_token.txt \
-d 7 \
-i input_channel.csv \
-o output_channel.csv \
-u users.csv \
-b SnitchBot
Configure as you see fit; name the bot creatively; put it in a crontab; and take good care of your people!
-r
: Dry-run thestandup_snitch
report to standard output instead of sending it to Slack.
You can manually maintain users.csv
to add users (running
list_users.py
and merging the lists) and remove users (deleting
lines from users.csv
). However, since internships, vacations, and
normal turnover means that the set of active users changes frequently,
two bash
scripts are included to make these tasks easier. Each
script creates a file users.csv.new
, shows you the proposed changes,
and prompts you to verify the changes before applying them.
bash add_user.sh users.csv new_user_name api_token.txt
bash remove_user.sh users.csv user_to_remove
I am releasing this with trepidation because I know it's going to be
used by lousy bosses to harass their workers. In
our academic research group, we use
Slack, which we've found to be a great way to organize communications
between a bunch of busy people with varied schedules and semi-remote
working habits. (Much better than endless email threads with
ever-changing cc lists.) One of the ongoing expectations in our lab is
to touch base at least weekly on a #standup
Slack channel to let
your peers know what you've worked on, what you plan to work on, and
if you're stuck on anything.
I've personally seen a lot of very talented people drop out of
Ph.D. programs. In my experience, graduation rate has seemed highly
correlated with engaging one's peers about one's challenges in the
process of overcoming them. (Notably, it has also seemed almost
uncorrelated with intelligence; virtually everyone who gets into a
graduate program is smart enough to graduate.) Dropping out of grad
school seems to me to be mostly a failure of community. For this
reason, I was pleased to see the #standup
channel when I started
here and felt motivated to help enforce its usage. I wrote this bot to
automate the process of following up on students who might fall
through the cracks without extra attention.