Commands are handled even without slash-commands or mentions

[seanhoughton]

I believe most users of the framework would be surprised to know that their commands are matching all messages that contain the command string rather than just messages that explicitly mention the bot. All of the examples use very simple commands like "ping" and "hello" - if those were to be used in a real bot there would be many, many inadvertent matches and bot responses.

How are users expected to only execute commands for mentions? Mentions show up with the mention converted to bot ids:

<@MYBOTID> testing mentions

Should we add <@MYBOTID> to the front of all our command strings to ensure only mentions are considered commands?

[seanhoughton]

Let me elaborate a bit more with some use cases. I want to be able to talk to the bot with a command line:

@Mybot show myresource

The command definition might look like this:

	s.AddCommand(&slacker.CommandDefinition{
		Command:     "show {resource}",
		Description: "show the resource and any unhealthy dependencies",
		Examples:    []string{"info {resource}"},
		Handler: func(botCtx *slacker.CommandContext) {
			if botCtx.Event().Type == string(slackevents.AppMention) {
				resource := botCtx.Request().Properties().StringParam("resource", "")
				botCtx.Response().Reply(fmt.Sprintf("I heard your question about %s", resource))
			}
		},
	})

However, this will match many things that aren't intended to be commands. For example:

Why did @Mybot show this response?

How do I use @Mybot show?

The https://github.com/slack-io/commander package doesn't appear to be expressive enough to only match direct commands. At the very least we need some kind of constraint for the line start and end (^ and $)

Note that I could use a slash command, but they don't work in threads.

[seanhoughton]

We have just discovered that any time anyone says "help" in any channel with our Slacker-based bot in it the bot will respond.

[kalinda-pride]

To help anyone else encountering this problem before the issue is fixed, @sheldonhull describes a workaround:

I duplicated the code for help, disabled the standard help, and just mapped my mybot-help or mybot help. My use case was I am triggering on words, not bot mentions, so any help triggered the bot in this mode. I basically reproduced the help as a command so I could custom map the trigger words to be more specific to my need.

I do want this issue to be fixed. My use case is similar to @seanhoughton's: I want users to talk to my bot the same way on their command line, as in their Slack messages. I also want them to be able to talk about the bot or command line tool in Slack, without triggering the bot. Supporting "constraint for the line start and end (^ and $)" in command match would be very helpful to me.

[sheldonhull]

I think this is caused by listening for bot mentions in events which can cause it to double notify.

So I opted to use keywords and not require bot mentions directly. I'd suggest you look at the app setup and confirm you have disabled listening for bot mention events if you don't want it to trigger a double event matching both on the keyword plus the mention. If that doesn't make sense after you look I can dig back in my notes and update with more detail if useful.

I ended up using the convention. "!gpt" or "!trigger" for command registration matching and this got rid of all noise.

I found listening to keywords was great though for slackbot like fun and also processing with OpenAI I could filter down further to say stuff like "if seems looking for a list of regions of AWS deployments for our app respond with link to x, else respond only with <|im_end|>". This works great to be a helper with additional content that not expected but useful. Lots of tweaks like this.

Help is a special case. I disabled default handler and then created my own !help" that actually processes the same help content (close) but outputs it as a string for context with GPT and the. Help is AI powered so you can ask things like !help list image generation commands" or !help how do I create a ticket".

Mention me directly so I get notified if this helps a little and you have more questions.