QuatBot is a simple meeting-management bot for use with the Matrix. Taking turns during an online meeting -- and making sure everyone gets to have their say -- takes a bit of organizing, and this bot helps you do that. QuatBot runs as a command-line application.
Once the bot is built, it supports the meeting workflow that I personally participate in. It's not a general all-purpose meeting-bot. The meetings are a kind of stand-up, that is, a quick status-dump and question-and-answer session. For end-user information about using the bot from a Matrix client, see the user documentation.
The bot is controlled from the Matrix chat by text commands. Each command
is preceded by the command-character. By default this is ~ but that
can be changed, see src/watcher.cpp, the constant COMMAND_PREFIX.
The command-character must be the first character of
the message; that is, write ~command and not @bot: ~command or
please do ~command.
All of the commands start with the module name that is responsible
for the command. Modules are subclasses of the Watcher class.
Adding more modules is relatively straightforward: implement
the API, instantiate the modules and add them in Bot::setupWatchers().
Build-requirements for the bot are:
- CMake, https://cmake.org/
- Qt5 (Core, Multimedia, Network), https://www.qt.io/
- libQuotient, https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient
- make or ninja or similar, and a C++ compiler
QuatBot expects that CMake can find libQuotient though its
QuotientConfig.cmake file. If you don't have one (e.g. because
of an uninstalled or bundled libQuotient) you will need to
mess around with -D flags to CMake to tell it where the library
lives. I don't know what flags those are, though.
The bot can be run directly from the build directory. It can also be installed, and has no other files than the single executable. The command-line for the bot is:
quatbot <options> <room..>
Use --help to get an overview of command-line options. The most useful
ones will be:
-u <user>to set the user (Matrix user-id) to connect as.-o <user>to add additional operators at startup.
You may be prompted for a Matrix password. You can set it on the command-line
with the -p option if you like.
NOTE that if the password is entered on the command-line, it remains visible in command-history and in system tools like ps(1). Only run the bot that way on a trusted host.
Example for a full command-line (note the ' around each argument
to avoid shell processing of special characters):
quatbot -u '@adridg:matrix.org' '#quatbot-myownroom:matrix.org'
Logs are written to /tmp, in files named quatbot-<something>.log.
Meeting logs end up in nicely-named year-and-week logs, others will
get a timestamp or message-id as <something>. Note that people
abusing ~log may create a lot of log files locally.
QuatBot has not been audited for resource usage. It logs regularly to
standard out, which might be redirected to /dev/null, or saved somewhere.
Logs from meetings are stored in /tmp. It is probably possible to overwrite
logs, or otherwise mess around, if the people in the channel are malicious.
Use the --operator command-line argument to set more operators (admins)
for the bot at startup, e.g. by running it as follows:
USER="@quatbot:matrix.org"
OPS0="@adridg:matrix.org"
OPS1="@adridg-alt:matrix.org"
CHANNEL="#quatbot-myownroom:matrix.org"
quatbot --user $USER --operator $OPS0 --operator $OPS1 $CHANNEL
The bot also keeps a "database" in a writable location for coffee and tea usage, called "cookiejar". This is persistent across starts of the bot, but is of no importance whatsoever, since it's about the "amusement" module coffee.
There is an additional executable, qb-dumper, which connects to a room and then logs it. It doesn't do anything else. It happens to get the last 100 lines of history as well (under normal circumstances) which makes it "get" a bit of the past. This was added to be able to salvage the log of a meeting from the past, and is of limited functionality.
The dumper has the same options as quatbot, and a --since argument
to indicate what chunk of history to retrieve. The format is
rather inflexible. Use --since 2022-05-27T12:00, and consider the T
in there to be required: it must be the letter T.
The dumper prints to standard output, and also writes /tmp/quatbot.log
(a hard-coded filename) with the messages.