A guide for contributors

So you decided to help out with some of the work that goes into growing and maintaining Botwiki. First of all, a huge thank you!

All our work is organized in the Botmakers Slack group, so be sure to join us! And below is a breakdown of the areas where our team needs help and a list of tools that we use.

Submitting bots¶

With so many creative bots out there, it takes time to find them and properly document them. Our main Contribute page links to the bot submission and resource submission pages. When adding new content, keep in mind our submission guidelines.

And here are some tools that we use internally.

Sidekick¶

Sidekick is a helpful Slack bot that, among other things, keeps track of new bots added to the botsin.space Mastodon instance. Every notification posted in the dedicated #bot-feed channel contains a link that takes you to the bot submission page and prefills the name, description, and adds a link to the bot.

Look out for the “clipboard” 📋 emoji to know which bots should be submitted.

TIP: You can use has::clipboard: in:#bot-feed as a search term to find these easily.

When submitting a new bot this way, make sure to mark the Slack notification with a ✔️ (here’s a guide on how to do this in Slack) to let other volunteers know to skip the same bot.

The order in which bots are submitted doesn’t matter, so feel free to work on any bots you like.

Submit to Botwiki bookmarklet¶

We also have a bookmarklet that lets you prefill this information from the bot’s online profile page. Currently Mastodon and Twitter bots are supported.

More guides¶

We will be updating this page with more guides as we develop formal processes for our volunteers. If you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to reach out!