Notes and history

[mgwalker]

This will be a place we can capture notes and history on the Inclusion Bot. It could be useful for future maintainers to understand why certain implementation choices were made. I think this will mostly be a place to discuss the technical behavior of the bot rather than what it responds to, though certainly we can use it however we see fit. 🙂

[mgwalker]

• May 2020: Inclusion Bot (then "Guys Bot") is moved into Charlie, replacing the previous implementation as a Slackbot autoresponder. We decided to make the move because it allowed us to be more targeted with triggers, such as ignoring "guys" in quotes. (Inclusion/guys bot #208)
• May 2020: Made the bot message ephemeral, which means only the person who triggered the bot will see its response. The bot puts an emoji on the triggering message as a signal to the rest of the team that the bot has responded. (Some Inclusion bot updates #218)
• December 2020: Inclusion Bot is expanded to support responding to a wider variety of triggers and different alternatives. It also picks up on multiple triggers within a single message so it can respond to all of them at once. The list of triggers and alternative suggestions is pulled from the Inclusion Bot document (content warning: offensive language). (Tweak the guys bot to also handle other uninclusive language #258)
• June 2021: Inclusion Bot is expanded to include an optional modal window explaining why certain phrases or terms are problematic. (PROPOSAL: Inclusion bot explainer modal #299)
• October 2021: Inclusion Bot's message is tweaked to seem less like it is accusing someone of being non-inclusive. (Some Inclusion Bot updates #320)
• March 2022: Make a public markdown copy of the word list, in addition to the private, canonical document used for internal discussions (Add inclusion bot word list/reasoning to this repo #399)
• July 2022: Inclusion Bot's emoji is changed because people thought the previous one looked like a bus and more than one person described seeing it as "getting hit by the inclusion bus." (Change Inclusion Bot's reaction emoji #431)