The 'unsolicited' problem

[daveloyall]

I've seen on Reddit and Twitter, people will "summon" bots by posting a certain word or @mentioning some account. Perhaps you could go that route for the larger bot project you mentioned on your blog.

Cheers,
--Dave

[movermeyer]

Thanks Dave,

Thanks for the suggestion, I had forgotten that was a thing.

I think that fubes2000 might have said it best:

how is someone going to opt-in to a service that solves problems that they don't even know they have?

It's fairly easy to build a bot on GitHub that waits for someone to ask it to fix things. There are GitHub Apps, @mentions, or just having a separate site that you click on.

The problem is that of discovery. Almost no one is going to ever organically discover a bot like this. Even if they did, the chances of it impacting their repo is extrodinarily slim. And even then, the time spent authorizing the bot it is unfortunately far more of a barrier than simply receiving a pull request.

I understand why GitHub has this policy. But I also believe that bots like this can have tremendous value. I'll continue to think creatively in this area.

(If you're interested, there is also a bunch of discussion on the HackerNews post for this.)

[daveloyall]

I learned about the reddit bots by seeing other people invite them. The bot shows up and comments "I am a bot, I was invited here, I am going to do this thing". It doesn't tell you how to invite it--you can see the invitation for yourself.