Karma Bot

Karma bot tracks a karma score for each user. Use the bot with your friends to see who gets the most upvotes!

Using the Bot

To use the bot first add it to your telegram group chat. Currently the bot uses the username @PlusMinusKarmaBot. The karma bot tracks a karma score for each user in the chat it is added to. Reply to a message with a message starting with “+1” or “-1” to add or remove a karma point from the author of that message.

There are also various bot commands that can be used to interact with the bot as listed below.

Bot commands

Use the command,

/showkarma 

to show the karma for all users in the current chat.

Use the command,

/userinfo [username]

to give information on the history of the user with that username in the current chat.

Use the command,

/chatinfo

to display information about the current chat.

Use the command,

/showversion

to check what version of bot is currently running.

Use the command,

/checkchatkarmas

to view the karma rankings for any chat you’ve participated in (given or received a +1 in) This command can be used in a 1 on 1 conversation with the bot so that other users aren’t affected.

Architecture

The architecture uses a telegram bot wrapper ‘python-telegram-bot’ which stores its data in a locally hosted Postgresql database. Docker-compose is used to manage the project and push incremental builds to testing and production.

Setup guide

Install docker, set up a user with docker so you don’t use “root” to run docker-compose. The scripts/server_setup.sh file includes commands for installing docker and docker-compose on an ubuntu machine. To install, run

sudo server_setup.sh

The docker-compose tool is used to run the project. It creates two containers, one that runs a python server for the telegram bot and another that runs a postgresql database instance.

When developing to test changes run the following command

sh run.sh ENV_VAR_FILENAME

where ENV_VAR_FILENAME is a file in the format of test_env_vars.sh. Change the parameters as applicable to modify the run.

Change BOT_TOKEN value environment variable based on the token given by the BotFather.

Connecting to the database

Docker exposes postgres through port 5432 to the localhost so to connect from your localhost you can run the command

psql -h localhost -p 5432 karmabot test_user

Admin Maintenence

When a user tries to +1 themselves they receive a “witty response” that tells them not to +1 themselves. To modify the list of random witty respones: Modify the attempted_self_plus_one_response.csv to add or remove responses as desired.

Then run the following script to update the database.

sh scripts/db_admin_update.sh prod_env_vars.sh