Hubot not responding to @-mentions

[redhotvengeance]

With the new version (v3), Hubot can now have a username - yay! But @-mentioning Hubot by its username doesn't seem to work. For instance, this fails:

@hubot image me corgi

...while this succeeds:

hubot image me corgi

It looks like Hubot is only looking for its strict username (hubot) and the @ symbol is causing it to not register its name (@hubot). But think the expectation would be that @-mentioning Hubot would be like sending a command directly to it, and @hubot image me corgi == hubot image me corgi.

[grantmd]

It should, you're right. Will take a look (thought I fixed this at one point).

[lxfontes]

side effect of that, it also listens to its own messages. Ex: 'hubot help'

[lxfontes]

scratch that. had 2 bots (old ver + new ver) on the same channel yelling at each other.

[evansolomon]

had 2 bots (old ver + new ver) on the same channel yelling at each other

The mental image of this made me laugh

[evansolomon]

I haven't dug in very deeply, but it seems like this part of the hubot core should handle the @-mention case for us. Not sure what's going wrong.

[redhotvengeance]

@evansolomon I dug into the debug logs and found what seems to be the issue. hubot image me corgi logs:

[Tue Dec 09 2014 21:19:31 GMT+0000 (UTC)] DEBUG Received message: 'hubot image me corgi' in channel: my-hubot-sandbox, from: redhotvengeance

...while @hubot image me corgi logs:

[Tue Dec 09 2014 21:20:17 GMT+0000 (UTC)] DEBUG Received message: '<@U0352NXHB>: image me corgi' in channel: my-hubot-sandbox, from: redhotvengeance

It looks as though @-mentions get converted into an internal Slack id, so the regex fails because it is expecting the bot name rather than the Slack id.

[spdustin]

As a temporary workaround, I listed the User IDs for all users via the api (just click the "go" button once you're signed in over there, gentle reader). Once I got the User ID for the hubot bot account from the API response, I updated my procfile to include that User ID (inside angle brackets and prefixed with the @ sign) as an alias, like so:

web: bin/hubot -a slack -n botnamegoeshere -l "<@useridgoeshere>" 

[evansolomon]

@spdustin clever, just worth noting that doing that probably creates the opposite condition where "botname hello" no longer triggers a response

[spdustin]

Nope, that still works, because it's an alias. So in the above example, botnamegoeshere or @botnamegoeshere (which is converted to the internal user ID by the time it gets to hubot) both work just fine.

[spdustin]

What's funny is when you have slackbot responses set up for phrases that hubot says (like "ship it"). Our bot is named Christopher Walken (walken) and I keep imagining him getting all angry and up in slackbot's face.

[evansolomon]

Oh interesting, thanks for explaining the alias.

[spdustin]

As a note for others coming in to this thread

• The<@botuserid> form is necessary as the alias because Slack adds formatting around mentions so that clients can understand it's a mention
• Hubot will listen for his^† name (specified as the -n argument value) by default - you can also add an alias (specified as the -l argument value) and he'll listen for that, too
• Hubot doesn't care about "mentions" as a special type, only the raw text that the chat service gives to him

^†_{use of gender-specific pronouns not at all meant to imply that hubot has an actual gender}

[spdustin]

I wonder if 🪲 #9 needs to be revisited ... apparently, slack was "fixed" earlier by @grantmd to not format the text going to hubots.

[altryne]

I can confirm that @spdustin fix works for both @ mentions and jsut writing 'hubot'
Thanx!

[paulhammond]

I've just fixed this "properly" in #120, which will be in the next release (hopefully today!)

@spdustin: Thank you for the interim workaround!